


a mountain in colorado

by skuls



Series: X Files Rewatch Series [36]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Episode: s11e05 Ghouli, This is a weird one, scully and mulder appear in spirit (+ visions and flashbacks)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-24
Updated: 2018-09-25
Packaged: 2019-07-16 06:35:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 23,559
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16080494
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skuls/pseuds/skuls
Summary: While Jackson Van de Kamp is on the run, he encounters a series of assumed-dead relatives he didn’t know he had.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> so this fic came from a couple different places. i had this idea a couple months ago on a walk when i considered the fact that the samantha arc does not exist at all in the revival (and later realized that samantha isn’t even mentioned in the revival, if my memory serves me correctly), and then thought to myself, “but what if it was?” i’d always kind of wondered about what it would be like if jackson interacted with melissa and samantha, i’d never done an AU where melissa lives, the speculation pre-season 11 that emily would be in the revival had stuck with me. and i also wanted to do a crazy revival AU, because everything i had planned post season 9 for this series was canon compliant. and so it seemed right to write this.
> 
> i probably ripped off myself again (in terms of whispering images and california winter) except this one is weirder. and longer. mulder and scully aren’t really in this one except in spirit, but they sure as hell get talked about a lot. i also tried to give tribute to the van de kamps in this fic, even though they’re not really the main focus. the vdks deserved better.

The first day or two pass in a blur. A complete fucking blur. Gunshots and body bags and shattered snow globes. Jackson doesn't have time to think, to dwell on his parents being gone or the people chasing him. He communicates with his birth mom without thinking of anything but the visions he used to get in the middle of his seizures when he was a kid. Of her tearful monologue over his supposedly dead body. He disguises himself as the author on the back of the book in his bedroom, just for kicks; he tells his birth mother he wishes he could know her better, and then he drives away so fast it feels like an exhale. It feels like everything hitting him at once. 

(He has to stop thirty minutes into the trip, pull off on the side of the road and elapse into hysterical sobbing with his forehead hard against the steering wheel. He doesn't like for people to see him cry, but he knows that at this moment, he's more alone than he's ever been before.)

He has to leave. That much has been clear ever since he heard the gunshots. He doesn't have a choice. He has to miss his parents’ funeral (the thought of that makes him clench his teeth shut to hold back nausea, to keep from vomiting). He has to leave Bri and Sarah, and he has to distance himself from these birth parents of his. He doesn't know that there was ever a question about that. The small child in him wants to run up to this woman (to Ginger, to Dana Scully) and beg her to help him, to save his parents, to explain _why_ she gave him up. But his instincts tell him that it's a bad idea. It's too dangerous, he doesn't know her (or the man she's with that may be his birth father), he couldn't betray his parents like that. He _can't_ betray his parents like that.  He doesn't know what to do, but he does know this, at least. He has to leave. 

So he leaves. He drives west with the windows let down, the wind blowing across his face, and his fingers curled hard around the steering wheel in an effort at grounding himself. Anchoring himself to the earth.

\---

He doesn't know why he thought going to his grandmother's house is a good idea.

He makes it most of the way across the country in a week. The drive would've taken a day if he'd gone straight, but he finds it impossible to do that. He stops a lot, visits sights or cities, buys postcards that he'll probably never send. He watches TV in hotel rooms and buys bad mystery novels on audio book, the ones his mom loved, because if he dwells too long on any of this, he's going to go insane. In the back of his mind is the lure of this Dana Scully, the way their minds have melded for years, the possibility of an apocalypse he can't prepare for. His friend's and girlfriends’ phone numbers rattle around in his head, remnants of an age before he had a cell phone where he memorized numbers and used the landline, leaning against the kitchen counter. He is lonely, and he is scared, and his dad's mother is still in Wyoming. They fly out and visit her every summer. If he can't have his parents and he can't have his friends (and his birth mother is still not an option), than he thinks his grandmother might be the next best thing. (He doesn't want to be alone.)

So Jackson drives home, the place he grew up. The place he really loved before they had to move away, after that incident in the birthday party that left him in the hospital for nearly six months while strange doctors prodded at him and tested him and occasionally made him wear a hazmat suit, and his parents demanded to know, pleaded as to why he couldn't just  _ go home _ . They moved to Norfolk after that, and Jackson loves Norfolk—loves growing up near the ocean, getting high in the Chimera or the old sugar factory, going for runs on the beach or driving up the river, loves spending weekends on the ocean and, when he was little, fishing with his dad—but a part of him misses being a farm kid. He wonders if Wyoming might've been where he was supposed to end up all along, and navigating the streets of his old hometown is so familiar and wonderful, it feels like an adrenaline rush. It feels like home. 

Seeing his grandmother doesn't go as well as he thought it would. He expected hugs, tears, a joyous and grateful reunion. (He'd never, ever admit it, but he could really fucking use a hug right now.) When his grandmother opens the door, he actually steps towards her with open arms. 

But his grandmother pales, horror coming over her face. She tries to slam the door. She tries to slam the door, and Jackson sticks his foot out instinctively. His grandmother looks terrified, and he hates scaring people, but he's very experienced in the art of pushing his way into spaces where people don't want him to be. He remembers childhood summers with his grandmother: she made the best cookies in the world, she read  _ Corduroy  _ and Dr. Seuss books to him, she played trucks with him on the carpeted floor before it hurt her knees too much and told him stories about his dad as a little boy. He swallows. He says, “Grandma, it's me. It's Jack,” in a quivery, pleading voice. They'd named him Jackson after his dead grandfather, her husband. 

“Get the hell off of my porch,” his grandmother growls, and it's such a shock to hear her curse that Jackson can barely even respond.

“It's  _ me _ ,” Jackson pleads, his voice breaking. He just wants to go inside, he wants to see pictures of his mom and dad from when they were young; there's one with the three of him in it from the day after he was adopted, with him in a UFO onesie and his parents grinning so fucking big, right on the mantle. He wants to see it. He wants to hug his grandma like a little kid. “Grandma, please.”

“I don't know you,” she says coldly, and there are tears in her eyes. “You killed my  _ son _ . You're supposed to be  _ dead _ , and you killed my  _ son. _ I don't know who you are.”

Tears flood Jackson's eyes, too, the way it does when it's stingingly cold and the wind is in his eyes. He forgot it gets so cold here, he doesn't have a jacket. He stumbles back, weightless, and the door slams hard in his face. He can hear the frail sobs on the other side. He runs, instinctively, his teeth chattering, and speeds away down the dirt road, taking the curves so hard he's almost afraid he'll crash. 

He didn't kill his parents, not directly. He didn't pull the trigger the way those asshole cops expected. But he basically did. They died because of him. If they'd adopted a regular kid, they'd be alive today, and who knows where he'd be. But  _ they'd _ be alive. 

He drives home without thinking, drives to his parents’ old farm. He hasn't lived here since he was six or seven, but he still remembers the way. He's hoping that it's empty, but just his fucking luck, there's a light on in the window that used to be his bedroom and a truck parked up near the house. He shuts his headlights off and keeps driving, past the house and into the field until he reaches the barn. He parks behind, just out of view of the house, and lets his head fall weightlessly to the steering wheel. Doesn't push the tears back. 

\---

His father taught him how to milk a cow in this barn. He taught him how to muck a stall (with supervision), built him a rope swing like in  _ Charlotte's Web _ . It looks different now, run-down and empty, but it's close enough. Jackson sleeps there, even though it's probably stupid of him, makes a nest of dirty clothes and hotel towels since he doesn't have any blankets. He doesn't want to leave, doesn't want to break the spell. He and his dad camped out here once, sleeping bags on the dirt below the opening in the ceiling so they could look at the stars. He can't see the stars now, but he still stays, wraps himself in a dusty sweatshirt and some huge towels from a hotel in Iowa, and falls asleep almost immediately. 

He falls asleep like a dumbass, falls asleep like he is safe, and wakes up to red-and-blue lights flashing on the old boards of the walls. He hates how familiar that's gotten. He's awake in seconds, stumbling to his feet as various linens cascade to the ground, stumbling around foggily and wishing that for once, he could not be such a fucking idiot. He's probably brought this on himself. 

Jackson rubs at his eyes furiously, moves automatically towards the double doors at the back of the barn after shoving a holey sweatshirt over his head. His teeth are chattering and he's disoriented, foggy, and a fucking dumbass. So he lets the door slams hard behind him without thinking. 

There's a floodlight on the front of the barn before he knows it, voices shouting for him to come out, to freeze and stay where he is, to not make trouble for them or he'll be sorry. “ _ Fuck _ ,” Jackson hisses through clenched teeth, stumbling towards the cluster of pine trees nearby. He should go for the car, but they'll hear it, they'll shoot out the tires or some movie shit like that. He can hear the shouts, the footfalls growing closer, and he has no idea what he's going to do; he's stumbling backwards, pine needles scraping at his hands and face, when a hand claps over his mouth. 

With everything at his disposal—all the glass he's shattered, all the fights he's won, everything he did to those people in the hospital—he’d thought that he would have a better reaction to something like this. But all Jackson can do in the moment is yelp, try to wriggle free. Whoever it is grabs his arm and whirls him around, eyes dark and serious in the night. “Calm down,” the stranger hisses, and it's a woman's voice, deep and warning. “I'm on your side. I'm going to save your skin.”

_ Who the hell are you?  _ Jackson wants to demand, but he can hear the police, or DOD agents, or whatever the hell they are, drawing closer, and he knows it won't go well if they find him. So he nods. He doesn't know why, but for some reason, he nods. 

The woman takes her hand off of his mouth and begins pulling him through the woods, gently but firmly. She's going fast, faster than Jackson expected, and he follows behind her obediently, feeling like a puppy with the way he blindly follows. Pathetic. He felt some of that sting when he sent the dream to his birth mother, and look how that turned out. She couldn't save him, and who knows what this strange woman can do for him. But he follows her anyway. 

The woods aren't huge; he knows, he used to explore them all the time. Run through the pine trees just to see if he could. A few minutes and they're all the way across, the woman not really dragging him but definitely leading him still. The moonlight makes things clearer and he can see the woman's face now; there is something familiar about her that Jackson can't put his finger on. She's got curly dark hair that is honestly a moppy mess, and she's lanky, at least as tall as him, and he's pretty sure he's never seen her before. 

There's a car parked at the edge, and she takes him to it. “Get in, and I'll get you out of here,” she says quietly, and he gets in. She rounds the side of the car and climbs on, and they're moving before he knows it. 

Jackson is shivering, teeth chattering and arms wrapped around himself. The woman turns on the heat, and he shoots her a wary look, unsure if he should thank her. He settles for a hesitant, “Who the hell are you?”

The woman shoots him a look, nearly as warm as the one he must be giving her. “I’m your aunt—” she starts before breaking off with a laugh, shaking her head. “Um… My name is Samantha. Samantha Mulder.”

Jackson blinks stupidly in the wake of what she's said, trying to process. He's pretty sure that he is still half asleep. His dad doesn't have any sisters but his mom does: his Aunt Ursula, who lives up in New Hampshire. But if what happened with his grandmother is any indication, he won't have any more like with Aunt Ursula. And he doesn't have any other aunts. But then he remembers the woman who is his birth mother. Dana Scully. And the man she was with who he thinks might be his birth father. She called him Mulder. 

“Wait a second,” he says, not believing it even as he says it. “You're telling me that you… know my birth parents? That Mulder guy?” He doesn't believe it, but he's thinking about the man: the way he heard him comforting the woman. The man shouting his name in the hospital, and Jackson considering, for a split second, talking to him. The man in the gas station, Jackson deciding in a split second to disguise himself, deciding in another second to talk to his birth mother, but not him. He doesn't know why, outside of pure uncertainty, pure fear. He knots his hands in his hair, yanking his fingers through the tangles hard. 

The woman—Samantha, he supposes—is staring out of the window with a hard sort of look on her face. “Sort of,” she says softly. “I don't know Dana—your birth mother, I mean. I don't know your mother. But… your birth father…” She sighs, lifting one hand to rub at her forehead. “I'm his sister. I haven't seen him since I was eight years old.”

Jackson blinks in surprise. Whatever he'd expected, it definitely was not that. “So… you really are my aunt,” he says, barely even stopping to consider the fact that he doesn't really know that this Mulder guy is his birth father. 

He lets his head fall against the glass with a thunk. He'd really like to go back to sleep right now. 

“Yeah,” Samantha says, a touch of amusement in her voice. “I am.”

Jackson clenches his fingers in his hair again, his eyes half-shut. “What the hell are you… how the hell did you find me?” he says, nearly a groan. He has no idea whether or not he can trust this woman, but he's tired, and she did save his skin. And he's starting to see it, the similarities in their profiles, the color of their hair and a couple of other little things. They have the same eyes. It scares the shit out of him, but he could see how they are related. He doesn't necessarily like it, but he can see it.

“It's a long story,” Samantha says, her fingers tense against the wheel. “Are you hungry? I could go through a drive-through in a little while, maybe, if they're not following us.”

“ _ Tell  _ the story,” Jackson snaps. If it was that easy for this random lady to find him, that doesn't give him a lot of hope for this covert routine of his. 

She sighs as she checks behind them to see if they're being followed. “I've been expecting something like this to happen for a long time, Jackson,” she says wearily. “I've been keeping an eye on you in case it did, but you always seemed safe. You always seemed happy. So I never stepped in before now.”

Jackson's head lightly hits the side of the window again. “You've been watching me my  _ whole life _ ?”

“Checking in,” Samantha corrects, gently. “Believe me, if you had my family history, you'd be paranoid, too.”

Jackson can't decide if he's furious or not. He thinks he's just tired. But he's lost his car and all of his stuff, and his grandmother slammed the door in his face. All he has is this stupid sweatshirt he thinks used to belong to his dad. He says, “Okay, fine. But how did you know I'd be  _ here _ ?”

“I figured you'd want to go back to the first place you lived,” says Samantha. “It was a lucky guess.”

Jackson laughs bitterly. “Yeah. Lucky,” he says, leaning forward so his ribs press into his knees. Nothing in his life feels lucky right now. 

Samantha shoots him a nervous look from the driver's seat. “You don't have to stay here, Jackson,” she says softly. “I'm not going to force you. I want to help you if I can—because believe me, I know what it's like to run from these people—but you're free to leave whenever you want.”

He resists the urge to say that yes, he  _ could  _ leave whenever he wants whether he has her permission or not. He leans back against the headrest, exhausted, and mumbles, “Whatever,” like the most cliche teenager ever. He's disgusted with himself, but he's more disgusted with the whole situation. He'd really like to be anywhere else right now; he'd kill to be Marty McFly. 

Samantha backs off. Thank God. They drive in silence for a long time, the neon lights surrounding them blurring into starry pinpricks, and then into nothing as they hit a country road. Jackson closes his eyes and pretends that he is somewhere else.

\---

He doesn't know how long they drive. All he knows is that he wakes up as soon as they stop. They're on the side of a dark road, and Samantha turns towards him, whispering, “We're going to switch cars now, if you're still coming with us. We have somewhere you can stay for a few days if you want, recuperate.”

Jackson nods dumbly, because what else is he gonna do while he's still half asleep. When they get out of the car, he sees the other one clearly in the moonlight, the other car and the red-headed woman standing against it. For one breathless second, he thinks it's Scully, and that split second reaction ranges from the childhood safety he felt when seeing Ginger in the middle of seizures, to fear, because he doesn't know if he can handle talking to her right now. He doesn't know how to process everything that happened (the conversations they had outside the hospital and the gas station, that felt so fucking easy like he really was someone else, that felt almost hopeful; versus the anger he has at her for giving him up, for not getting to Norfolk fast enough to save him and his parents), and he doesn't want to deal with it. But then he sees that the woman is much younger than Scully, and probably taller, too, and he breathes a sigh of relief. 

But it doesn't end there. The woman isn't Scully, but she looks  _ familiar _ . Jackson is starting to wonder if she's another long lost relative—but what are the odds that another long lost relative who looks like his birth mother would be hanging out with a chick who looks like his probably-birth-father?

And then Samantha says, “Hey, Em,” and the woman says, “Hey Samantha.” And she turns to him and says, “Hi, Jack,” in a really familiar way. Like she  _ knows  _ him. 

And as Jackson grows closer, he suddenly sees it in a way he hadn't before. His eyes widen in amazement. She's grown up a lot, but she still looks the way she did eleven or twelve years ago. 

“ _ Emily _ ?” he says incredulously. She nods. “From the hospital? The Goldman program?”

“That's me,” the woman confirms, and she grins, a little happily, a little grimly. “It's good to see you again.”

Jackson is honestly pretty floored. Tonight has gone way beyond his expectations for weird. He says, “How the hell…”

“I'm sorry, but this feels like a conversation for another time,” Samantha says, extending a hand like a peace offering. She turns to Emily seriously. “You weren't followed here?”

Emily shakes her head. Jackson watches her, thinking about how this is weird as shit. It's been, what, ten or eleven years? What the  _ fuck. _ She's a lot older now, and apparently, she's mixed up in all this mess. He probably should've expected that, considering what they went through together. But why is she hanging out with his apparent aunt?

“You're gonna go dump the car?” Emily says softly, like she knows the drill.

“Yeah.” Samantha clasps her briefly on the shoulder. “I'll be home tomorrow, okay? Tell Melissa not to worry.”

“She's already worried,” Emily says lightly, rolling her eyes. “Be safe, okay?” Samantha nods, and then she's turning away, she's climbing into the car and driving off, leaving Jackson standing by Emily's car, blinking with confusion. 

“C'mon,” Emily says, just lightly enough that it doesn't sound like a command. “Are you hungry? I bet you're hungry. I brought snacks.”

He is, in fact, hungry. He gets in the car and finds a grocery bag filled with cellophane with the toe of his shoe. 

Emily drives slightly more crazy than Samantha did, taking curves at hairpin speeds. Jackson would complain, but this is the first person he actually knows who has been remotely friendly to him since leaving Norfolk. Even if he hasn't actually seen Emily since he was six or so, it's still something. She's talking, and Jackson is so overwhelmed that it actively takes a few minutes to understand her. “I know you must be really freaked out right now,” she's saying. “That this must be really overwhelming for you. But I swear that we're on your side. We want to help you.”

“Where are we going?” Jackson asks, probably a lot nicer than he asked Samantha. He actually likes Emily; he admittedly hasn't thought about her since they left the hospital, not really, but he always liked her. She was probably his best friend in that shitty place, even though she was six or seven years older. She taught him how to play poker. She taught him how to con the nurses into skipping their treatment for the day. She was jealous he had a home and parents to go back to. 

He had never pictured her like this, a woman in her twenties who drives like a maniac and apparently helps wayward freaks running from the government. But then again, Emily is a freak herself. He remembers that, too.

“Somewhere safe,” Emily responds. “Where I went when I left the hospital.”

He remembers that part. He tears into a Slim Jim packet and tries to tell himself it's protein. “That… Samantha lady said she'd been… checking up on me,” he says awkwardly, peeling the plastic back with his jagged fingernails. (He learned to stop biting them years ago, but now feels like a more than appropriate time to pick it back up. He'd take up smoking if it wasn't so expensive, if it didn't taste so much like the weird nightmares he gets sometimes.)

“It's a long story, Jack,” Emily says gently. “It really is. But I swear, it's just been about protecting you.”

“She says she’s my… aunt.” His voice falters on the word, like a scratch in the record. He's thinking about his Aunt Ursula, his unmarried uncle and his grandma and his parents. He can't go to the funeral. He has a whole other family out there who isn't his family, because he's a Van de Kamp, and he's been a Van de Kamp for a long time, and his birth parents  _ gave him up _ , so he is not a part of their family. 

But for nine months, he was someone else. His birth parents, they called him William. 

Emily hesitates. The car jolts a little with the jerky movements of her foot. “She is,” she says finally, reluctantly. “And I'm…” She laughs uncertainly. “Jackson, I know you're not going to believe this, but… I'm your sister.”

Oh.  _ Oh _ . 

Jackson rubs at his eyes hard with his fingers. So  _ that  _ explains why he really did think she was his birth mother for a minute.

\---

He got bitten in the eye by a tarantula when he was six years old, when he was fooling around at his birthday party. It shouldn't have ended up being the big fucking deal that it was. 

His parents took him to the hospital, of course, and he was probably fine. But something happened that made the doctors want to keep him. They wanted to put him in some program called the Goldman something-or-other, supposedly related to this bigger program they had down in DC. His parents hadn't liked it—Jackson can remember his mother very nearly physically fighting his doctor over the whole mess, over wanting to know what was wrong with him, why he couldn't come home. But they'd consented, largely because of how much the doctors reiterated that it would be the right thing for him. That they were doing the right thing. 

Jackson knows that they were liars now, and he thinks a part of him suspected it then, even as a little kid. But he couldn't do anything about it. He went with the doctors to the private wing of the hospital, where he got his own room and his own TV and he got to wear an eye patch like a pirate. His mom and dad tried to talk it up like that whenever he visited:  _ Look, Jack, look how cool! It's important that you be here, buddy, really important. They're going to make you well, you're going to help other people.  _ But it never worked. He thinks he always knew. 

He made friends with the other kids, because that was about the only companionship he had. (His school friends weren't allowed to visit.) A lot of them were quiet, a lot of them didn't want to talk or to play. But there were some cool ones, some kids his age he really liked to hang out with. Some of the older kids were nice, too. There was one named Emily, a girl with bright hair and bright eyes and a level of snark that Jackson could hardly believe at six. “She's too big for her britches,” his mom would've said, if she'd seen, but she didn't see, and besides, things were different there. Jackson thought it was cool, how Emily mouthed off to the doctors and nurses (because the doctors and nurses were never nice here, not like on TV). 

She seemed to like him, too. Sometimes when the other kids didn't want to play, Jackson would go and sit with her in her space between the wall and the musty old couch. “Is this your fort?” he asked the first time, and she nodded. He was the only one she would let back there. She had a rule that you couldn't talk back there, at least not out loud. So they always talked silently. 

Jackson had never met anyone who could do it, too, before the hospital; he always thought that he was the only one who could do it. The way he had broken the glass of the sliding door, or the way he could make people see things. He remembers being excited about that, finding someone else who could do it. He and Emily would talk silently behind the couch, and silently when it was dangerous to talk out loud. All the kids did it, but Emily was the only one to warn him.  _ You have to be careful,  _ she'd said.  _ If they catch you, they'll take you more often. You won't get to go home, ever. _

That subject came up often, the subject of home. Emily was upset she didn't have one. She was so much older than him—twice his age—that Jackson couldn't believe she wasn't an adult. “I'm only twelve,” she said angrily once, out loud. They were sitting cross-legged on the floor, by the game table, and playing cards. Someone had scribbled on the two and four and drawn mustaches on all the Queens. Jackson had said that he might be going home in two weeks, even though the doctors always said that and it kept getting longer and longer, until his parents had yanked him out after half a year passed. “It's not fair. I want to go home.”

“Maybe you could come with me,” Jackson said. “Maybe my mom and dad could 'dopt you.” His parents had wanted to adopt him a sister, once, a little one. One time his mom asked why he hung out with a big kid all the time, and he said, “She's nice. She's like my big sister.”

Emily's shoulders drooped. “I don't think your parents want me,” she mumbled. “I don't think anyone does.”

But someone had come for Emily. Jackson remembers this very clearly. In his fourth month in the hospital, two women came. A redhead and a dark-haired woman. Jackson had thought maybe they were her moms, like how his friend had two moms. Especially because the red-headed woman looked like her, and Emily cried and hugged them when they came on Visiting Day. His mom had talked to the women like she talked to the other parents at Car Riders. But when he asked Emily, Emily said, “They're not my  _ mom. _ ” When Jackson asked his mom, she said they were Emily's aunts. He never asked Emily about it. He doesn't know why. 

His mom used to come read to him every night, sit on the bed beside him and read from thick chapter books.  _ Harry Potter _ .  _ The Hobbit. _ Jackson remembers feeling stupidly safe because no one ever made fun of him for it, like they would've at school if they'd known. He remembers hating the hazmat suits, remembers pretending he was an astronaut. He remembers having thumb wars with Emily and crawling behind the couch when the nurses came. Emily always seemed too big, lanky limbs and scraped knees folded up in the small space. 

Emily left. He remembers that. He remembers seeing the women—her  _ aunts _ ?—arguing with the doctors, talking worriedly with his mom, remembers Emily with balled-up fists and red eyes and tear tracks, kicking the wall with those dumb shoes they made them wear. He asked her what was wrong, and he doesn't remember what she said. He does remember this: about three days before Emily left, the woman with dark hair. She came into his room and gave him a big smile. Not the fake kind the doctors gave; a real one. “Hi, Jack,” she said, grinning so wide he could see her teeth. 

“You're one of Emily's aunts, right?” Jackson asked suspiciously. “The ones who aren't her moms?” He was a little sad that they might be taking Emily away; he thought that maybe he could convince his parents to take Emily home. And he was at the point where he wasn't big on strangers yet. 

The woman got a funny look on her face. She nodded her hand and extended her hand for him to shake. Jackson took it, relieved; most of the doctors were scared to touch him, but she wasn't. He pumped it up and down like his dad had taught him.

“I had a question for you, Jackson,” said the woman. “Emily has told me a lot about you. She says you're getting good at poker.”

“Yeah, I'm gonna beat her someday,” Jackson said in a proud sort of way, prodding the gap where his baby tooth used to be with his tongue. 

“I'll bet,” the woman said, and smiled again. She folded her hands on the bed, and looked him right in the eye. “I've talked to your mom a lot lately, Jackson, and she seems like a really nice woman.”

“She is,” Jackson said immediately, absolutely sure of that. He loved his mommy a lot. 

The woman nodded a little, still looking him right in the eye, real serious. Like a teacher. “Are you happy, Jackson? Do you enjoy your life here in Wyoming?” she said calmly. 

It reminded him of those questions in church, when they asked him if he loved God and Jesus and his mom and dad and cat. “Yes,” he said immediately, because it was true. 

“Are your parents happy? Do they ever get scared?”

His mom had cried when he broke the glass doors, even though she hadn't know he did it. She just knew he got really mad and then it exploded. “Sometimes they get scared,” he mumbled, leaving out the part burning at the back of his mind:  _ Because of me.  _

“Do  _ you _ ever get scared, Jackson?” the woman asked gently, really gently. “Of other people? Do you ever think anyone is going to hurt you or your mom and dad?”

He shook his head. Changed his mind in an instant, nodded and motioned to the woman to lean closer. She did obediently. He leaned in, too, cupped a hand around her ear and whispered, “The doctors here. They're scary. They yell at Mommy, and their tests hurt. And Emily hates them.”

He knew why she hated them, because he hated them, too, even though he wasn't supposed to hate anybody. They took stuff from his hip bone, and they put him in hazmat suits, and they acted like they were scared of him. He hated it. 

The woman nodded, like she understood. She leaned back, and her big brown eyes were full of understanding. “I'd bet you wanna get out of here, huh, buddy?” she whispered back. He nodded vigorously. She reached out and tousled his hair. “I think your parents want to take you home, too, bud,” she said solemnly. “I don't think it'll be much longer.”

She held up her hand for a high-five, and Jackson smacked it. And then she stood up and headed towards the door. 

“Hey!” Jackson called, because he had a question; he'd just thought of one. The woman turned around. “How come you didn't come for Emily sooner?” he asked, because he wanted to know. He remembers Emily saying,  _ I've been here for a really long time, Jack.  _

The woman looked sad for a minute. “Because I didn't know she was here,” she said. And then she waved goodbye, and she was gone. 

She looked like a poodle. Jackson remembers thinking that all at once, a shock through his system. He remembers thinking she looked like a poodle. Cause she had really curly hair. 

\---

Jackson wakes up with a start in an unfamiliar room. Not a hotel room; it looks more like a log cabin. He's on a soft bed, and he's not covered up or anything; his dad's sweatshirt is still on him, too large with droopy sleeves. He gulps and sits up so fast he almost whacks his head against the bedpost. 

The window is unlocked, he sees. The door is cracked open. He could run, if he wants to. There is nothing stopping him. Excluding Emily, he's pretty sure he's more powerful than the people in this house. 

But something in him freezes, sitting on the edge of this bed in his raggedy clothes and feeling the heat of the house. He  _ hates _ sleeping outside. There is coffee somewhere in this house. There is probably food; he is seriously, seriously hungry. And Emily and Samantha, overall, didn't seem overly threatening. He thinks that this is at least worth checking out. 

He gets off of the bed and heads for the door. It's kind of pathetic, he thinks, how easily he'll bend to the promise of food and coffee, but it's not pathetic enough to make him change his mind. 

Outside of the bedroom is a weird little kitchen-dining-room-living-room area, like in apartments. Samantha's sitting at the table—he recognizes her immediately—with a woman with the same bright hair as Emily. 

“You're not a long lost relative, too, are you,” Jackson says dryly, already knowing the answer before the woman even looks at him. She looks just like Emily, which means she looks just like Scully: red hair, blue eyes, lots of freckles. Her hair is longer than Emily's, and she's definitely a lot older than Emily—closer to Samantha's age, closer to Scully's, with touches of gray in her hair—but there's definitely a connection. Which means there's a connection to him. 

The woman smiles at him with the same ease as Emily. Not the pained way that Samantha had. “I'm afraid so,” she says. “Hi, Jackson. I'm Melissa.” She extends her hand politely, like he's six and in a hospital bed again. 

Jackson doesn't take it. “Scully's sister,” he says flatly. 

Melissa gets a look on her face like the name is painful. The reminder. “Yeah,” she says quietly. “I'm Dana's older sister.”

Jackson gets the sinking suspicious that this woman hasn't seen his birth mother in a long time. There's a white scar near her hairline, and he knows what it is before having to ask. A bullet wound. 

“There's coffee, Jackson,” Samantha says, standing. “Help yourself. I know you must be hungry.”

He heads straight for the coffee maker. Samantha passes him a chipped mug with a moose on it, captioned  _ Colorado. _ So that's where they are. She retrieves bread and motions to the fridge wordlessly, and he makes a disgusting sandwich that his mom or Sarah would've hated, wrinkled their noses at. When he's done, he joins them at the table, just because it seems rude to go somewhere else. 

The women watch him, serious, wistful looks on their faces. Jackson knows they haven't seen their siblings—his birth parents, he thinks, yes, really—in a long, long time. 

He takes three giant bites of the sandwich and more gulps of the scalding coffee before he puts it down. Says, “So why am I here? Really.”

“To keep you safe,” Melissa says. Her hand is flat on the table, bright nail polish on her fingers, flimsy scarf wrapped around her neck. “That's why we're all here.”

He turns to Samantha, who is quiet, her eyes on the table. “You said you'd been keeping an eye on me,” he says, and it's suddenly all spilling out. “You were there in the hospital, with Emily. You talked to me… you asked me if I was happy. You talked to my mom.”

Samantha nods. It's her, the woman he thought looked like a poodle when he was six. He hasn't thought about her since then, there were so many more overbearing things about that hospital visit… but he remembers. It's her. “Yeah, that was me,” she says. “I wanted to make sure you were okay.”

Anger flashes in his mind, clear and red. “So you were gonna, what, kidnap me if I'd said I wasn't happy? What was gonna happen there? You were going to take me away from my parents?”

“I wanted to make sure you were safe,” Samantha says immediately. “Make sure your parents weren't being manipulated, or part of the Syndicate themselves. Believe me, I spent a good chunk of my childhood living with a really fucked up man and the family he'd practically thrown to his employers. Emily got stuck in that hospital. I've seen a ton of other kids in the exact same situation. I wanted to know you were okay.”

“That's fucked up,” Jackson snaps, but he feels sick even as he says it. He's done worse things. At least this woman had good intentions. He honestly doesn't know if he'd rather she  _ had _ taken him away, because if she had, maybe They wouldn't have come and killed his parents. 

“It is. I'm sorry,” says Samantha, and she really does sound sorry. Her eyes are the same as that Mulder guy's when she looks sad. “But I think you know how bad these people can be. I didn't want you to be subjected to it.”

Jackson swallows, looking down at the table. There's old scratches in the table, a carving:  _ Emily was here.  _ Sloppy marks, that tells him she did this when she was still a kid. It's insane to think that he is older now than Emily was when Melissa and Samantha got her out of the hospital. He wonders what it would've been like if he had come here. 

“So,” he starts again, his voice rough. He's probably going to cry, later. He wishes his grandma had let him in the house—except he's glad she didn't, because maybe she'd be dead now, too. “How did you two end up here together? If you're not actually related aside from your siblings having kids together.”

Melissa laughs dryly. She seems more carefree than Scully was—maybe not by a lot, but it's there. He has sudden, sharp memories that are not his of a shared bedroom that smelled of sage and perfume, hopscotch and stolen makeup and playing dress up, having coffee at a kitchen table in some flung-open house. He's seeing Melissa as she was some twenty years ago, and then something shifts, and he's seeing his birth mother as she was. Scully. Ginger. It makes him unexpectedly choked up, so he blinks hard and tries to concentrate on what Melissa is saying. 

She's saying, “That's a long story, Jackson. It really is. But I'd be glad to tell you if you want.” 

Jackson taps his fingers on the carving, Emily's name. He wishes this was happening with aunts he knew, the sisters of parents who had kept him and raised him and  _ love _ him… He misses his parents so much it hurts. He doesn't know how to feel about this. “Maybe another time,” he says. And then he stands and walks off. 

Samantha and Melissa don't try to stop him. He's grateful for that. 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warning for references to/depictions of events from christmas carol/emily, paper clip, one breath, and various parts of the samantha arc.

Jackson doesn't go back to sleep when he reaches the bedroom. He doesn't think he could relax if he wanted to, not with these women who say they're his aunts in the next room. He sits on the floor of the room he woke up in and reads one of the paperbacks he finds on the shelf. He could leave, but he doesn't want to. It's warm, and there's coffee, and there's food. He'll stay for now. It may be petty of him, but it's been a long time since he stayed somewhere with free food.

Hours pass, he thinks, before anyone comes to talk to him. It’s Emily who sticks her head in, hair thrown back into a loose braid and a small, cautious smile on her face. “Hey, Jack,” she says gently. “Just wanted to come… check on you.”

It still feels so strange to look at her and see a woman in her twenties instead of a twelve year old kid. “Hi, Emily,” he says, putting the book down.

She's standing in the door without really moving one way or another, and he takes it more or less as a question. “You can come in,” he says with a sigh, putting the book down. It's somewhat reluctant, but he would much rather talk to her than the other two, he guesses. “Or whatever. Whatever you want to do.”

Emily grins a little wider. She enters the room and comes over to sit on the floor beside him, backs against the bed. The way they sat behind the couch years ago. Jackson gulps, looks at his hands in his lap.

“Soo, uh…” he says after a few beats of sitting in silence. “Are those… Samantha and Melissa people pissed or whatever?” He won't call them _Aunt_.

Emily shrugs. “I haven't seen Missy; I think she went back to the house. And I think Samantha might've gone to the store. But I seriously doubt it. They… they know what you've been through, Jackson. It's not easy. It hasn't been easy on any of us.”

Jackson still isn't looking at her. His legs are long enough that his feet hit the wall; he taps the toe of his sneaker against it absently. “So, what's… what's your deal? You're my… my sister?” he says too quickly, words spilling angrily out of his mouth. He honestly isn't sure how he feels about it, this strange new piece of information; he just wants to understand.

“Half-sister,” Emily says sheepishly. “Mulder's not my dad.”

“So in the hospital… when you said that Melissa and Samantha were your aunts…”

“Half true.” Emily smirks. “Felt like an easier lie. And Samantha is the one who found me; I would've called her Mom if she asked, I was so grateful.”

“Huh.” Jackson stares at his shoes, the smudgey space where Sarah wrote _S + J,_ and drew a heart around it in Sharpie. “But… how did you end up in the hospital? Cause you said you didn't have a home, or… Did… Did Scully give you up, too?”

There's a lump in his throat, thinking about her crying over his supposedly dead body—she’d said, _I gave you up for adoption, not because I didn't want you, or because you were any less loved… I was trying to keep you safe._ She'd said, _I thought I was being strong because it was the hardest thing I've ever done._ She'd said, _I need you to know that you were never forgotten._ And he wants to believe—he _wants_ to believe—that she meant all of that. That she does love him. That she didn't want to give him up. Every ounce of longing for that feels like a betrayal of his mother, but hearing Ginger say that, after years of wondering… But if she gave up another child… if she gave up Emily, left her to be torn apart by the wolves and never came looking for her…

He used to think maybe he'd been kidnapped by someone and brought to his parents, who had no idea what had happened. Someone like the doctors who kept him in the hospital. When he seized or had nightmares… when the doctors had set off gas in his room, or when they were doing the painful tests… he'd see this woman with soft, sad eyes and felt a connection, felt _her_ , and wondered. He loved his parents, but a part of him hated the fact that someone had given up. That this woman had given him up. He used to think maybe he'd been kidnapped. He doesn't know if he could take anymore of this, not a single bit, if Dana Scully gave up both of them.

“No, no, no,” Emily says immediately, as if sensing his train of thought. “She didn't give me up. She… for a while, she didn't even know I existed.”

Jackson looks at her in astonishment. She's suddenly pale, her knuckles white where her hands are clenched in her lap. “I was an experiment,” she says, her teeth clenched. “I mean… more so than any of the rest of us are. They created me in a laboratory, and then put me up for adoption, and then when my parents resisted the experiments they were doing on me, they killed them and made it look like my dad had murdered my mom and committed suicide.”

“Jesus,” Jackson says in a choked breath. The fantasy he'd created for himself as a kid had actually _happened_ to her. The story they created about what happened to his parents, what they said he did… the same thing had happened to Emily's father. They'd killed her parents, too. “That's…”

“I know,” Emily says bitterly, shaking her head hard. “I know.” She rubs at her eyes, her jaw rock-hard. “That's when Dana found me,” she adds, and her voice is softer. “I was three years old, barely, so I don't remember it that well. But she found me, and she wanted me to come live with her. She was going to try to adopt me.” Her knees are pulled to her chest, like a little kid, her chin on her knees. “And she was… nice,” she says in a soft voice. “She was. I remember thinking that. I missed my mom, but I remember thinking that she was nice.” She smudges a thumb under her eyes as if to wash away tears.

 Jackson gulps. He's wondering what would've happened if he had come out from under that desk as himself. If he had talked to them. He's thinking that her memories of Scully sound exactly like what he used to think when he was a kid. She seemed nice.

“But… I got sick,” Emily mumbles. “And I got worse. And they faked my death, and they took me away, and Dana never knew.” She rubs at her face, hard. “So, you know. You can't really blame Dana for any of that. She really didn't know. She wanted to be my mom, but she never had the chance.”

Jackson's head drops back against the bed, weak. Thinking of Scully's teary voice: _I'm so sorry that I didn't get the chance to know you._ So many fucking things in his head right now. “Holy fuck,” he mutters. “Emily, I'm… I'm so sorry.”

She shrugs, her eyes downcast. “It happened,” she says. “I… I used to resent Dana for never coming to save me, but how could she have known? I remember they injected something in me, and I started to go to sleep, and Dana… Dana was there the whole time. She thought she saw me die, because she was _right there._ She lay beside me, she held me and stroked my hair and stayed with me the whole time. Whatever they did to me, it was convincing. And I… I think I understand what that was like for her. I understand why she never looked for me.”

Jackson turns his head away, scuffs his shoe against the wall again. He wishes he could be that forgiving. He doesn't understand how she can be that forgiving. “I've… seen her,” he says quietly, feeling like he's admitting to something wrong. Feeling guilty. If anyone should've seen her, it should've been Emily. The springs of the bed are bearing into his back. “All my life, I've seen her. Especially in moments when I was… scared, or in pain.” In the hospital, in the middle of fights or when his powers flared up, when he seized. He saw her, and he felt her emotions—denial, fear, regret, and strong flares of an emotion that might be caring. “And I think she could see me, too,” he adds.

Emily is quiet, and for an irrational second, Jackson is sure she thinks he's crazy. For another second, he thinks she might be jealous. But then she says, “I used to think I could see Dana. Or… or you.” She chews at her lower lip, picking at a loose thread on her jeans. “I always thought it was wishful thinking. But a couple of weeks ago… I think I saw what was happening to you. Your parents… and then I saw your dead body… I think I was seeing what Dana saw. And you running. And then Samantha got the news that you… you know. And I thought, maybe.” She swallows, her chin still to her knees; she looks like a little kid, the way that Jackson feels inside. He wonders what things would've been like if he and Emily had grown up together, really grown up together. He thinks he is starting to see it, this supposed sibling connection. “But it wasn't a lot,” she adds. “Especially not after I came here. It took a while for me to put it together.”

There are a lot of questions Jackson has, and he has no idea which is the most sensible. But he goes with the first one that sticks out: “How did Samantha know about my parents?”

“Well, we get Internet here, for one,” Emily says. “Nice little innovation from the past few years… But we've had a couple informants on the inside. The most recent one sent us the information as soon as she heard. She knew that Samantha really wanted to know if anything like that happened to you.”

He doesn't say anything to that. He doesn't know how to. He and Emily sit in silence for a few beats more before she stands, picking herself up slowly from the floor. Her eyes rimmed red around the edges from crying. But she smiles at him, and it's genuine. “Listen, Jack,” she says. “You don't have to stay here, although you're more or less protected here. And you don't have to… spend time with us or anything. But I just want you to know that if you need to talk… I'm around.” She opens his door, adding, “I sleep over at Missy's; it's the cabin across the way.”

“Oh,” Jackson says dumbly, genuinely unsure of what else to say. “Um, thank you.”

She nods at him, and he meets her eyes, and she really, really does look like Ginger. She looks like the girl who came running into his room one night to hug him goodbye. Like she really could be his big sister.

She closes the door behind her.

\---

Samantha makes dinner. He figures out that he's staying in her cabin. She makes dinner, and he eats it, but he doesn't eat with her and she doesn't ask him to. She's watching Netflix on a laptop when he goes out for food, following the smells, and she doesn't really interact with him outside of, “Help yourself,” accompanied by a tense smile, but he can feel her watching him as he gets the food—warily, like out of the corner of her eye. “The bathroom's down the hall. There should be towels and soap and stuff,” she adds as he heads back towards his room. “Make yourself at home. Help yourself to whatever you want.”

The plate of food feels too heavy in his hands. Like a fucking brick. “Thanks,” he says.

As he turns around to keep going, his eyes fall on a framed photograph: a family of four dressed in sixties-like clothing. Two dark-haired adults who must be his birth-grandparents, and in front of the woman, a little girl with her hair in braids. Samantha, he deduces, a long fucking time ago. And another kid at nine or ten, who he knows instinctively is Mulder. Jackson realizes, suddenly, that he doesn't know the guy's first name, and it comes to him in a rush of a moment: Fox. Fox Mulder. He wants to laugh, but he doesn't want to offend Samantha or anything.

He realizes that there's no way that this Fox Mulder is not his birth father, because he looked almost exactly the same in the fifth grade. Give the kid a worse haircut and a _Lord of the Rings_ t-shirt, and it could be him.

His heart is pounding too hard. He rushes for the door of his bedroom, clutching the plate so hard that his knuckles turn white, and doesn't leave the room for the rest of the night.

\---

Jackson ends up staying for a few days.

It's not a calculated move outside of the fact that he doesn't really have anywhere to go or any way to get there, without his car. And outside of the fact that he actually kind of does want to catch up with Emily. He spends most of his time by himself—reading, hiking, watching TV or doing research on a laptop that Samantha offers him and he takes gratefully—but Emily comes to visit several times, and he never turns her away. He doesn't know why outside of this strange bond that he feels like has been preserved from their days at the hospital. She feels like the easiest to talk to. They watch movies or TV shows, play poker for old times sake. At one point, she takes him hiking, showing him the places she's always liked visiting. She has a lot of questions for him, wants to know what's happened in his life between his period in the hospital and the point where it all blew up in his face, but he peppers her with questions of his own when he feels like it. Mostly clarifying things. He genuinely wants to know.

This place, she tells him, used to be some prestigious summer camp thing that got abandoned. There used to be more people here—she can't remember all of the names, but she does mention a guy named Gibson Praise, who is like him in the way of weird paranormal powers, particularly telepathy—but now it's pretty much just her and Melissa and Samantha. “We stay out of habit,” she says, “or out of fear. Our family has always kind of been in the… limelight, so to speak, and Samantha's always said it's too dangerous to really leave here, have contact with the outside.”

Jackson can't really argue with that logic. After all, look what happened to him. Look what happened to her.

He doesn't see a lot of Samantha aside from their encounters around meal times. Samantha cooks and always makes enough for him, and enough, it seems, for Emily and Melissa if they came over. They don't really talk outside of pleasantries, and he's okay with that. He barely sees Melissa at all, aside from walking past her house sometimes. She always waves. He almost never waves back.

But, in some sense, he sees a lot of them. He has this habit of sinking into visions of other people at quiet moments, seeing things he probably shouldn't be able to see. It used to happen during boring moments at school, with, like, what his parents are doing at work, or at night when he couldn't sleep, with Bri and Sarah. But his parents certainly aren't an option anymore, by any means, and mentally checking in on Bri and Sarah, or any of his extended family, is just too painful. And he's studiously avoiding seeing Scully, if he can. So he's not really trying to see anyone at all. But it happens anyway, and it happens involuntarily. Like some cosmic force wants him to get to know this other family. At least said cosmic force sticks to things that aren't too painful.

It's little things. Little, random snippets from childhood: Samantha playing with a black Lab on a beach. Melissa painting her own nails and the nails of another little girl with messy red hair that Jackson pretends he doesn't recognize. Samantha riding a bike, Samantha playing baseball with a dark haired boy that Jackson also silently denies knowing. Melissa walking to school. Melissa dancing with friends in formal wear under the stars, Melissa arguing with boys who must be her brothers at dinner, Melissa driving off to college. Samantha with needles poking at her arms. Samantha running through the woods, Samantha following a raven-haired woman Jackson doesn't recognize up to one of these cabins, shivering and shivering. Melissa waking up in a blindingly white room, arms strapped down by her side and tears wet on her face.

He sees bits and pieces of Emily's life, too, but he thinks he's only seeing what Emily is letting him see, because it's all happy stuff. Playing with other kids at a children's home. Sitting in the backseat of the car with Samantha and Melissa in the front and crumpled McDonald's wrappers all over the floor and all the windows down. Watching movies with Melissa, learning how to drive with Samantha, hanging out with other kids at the camp/hideout, or whatever this is. Snippets of playing with him at the hospital. She shows him a scene, once, of her on the floor coloring when she's very, very little, and Scully sitting beside her. Scully using a soft, gooey voice that Jackson has never ever heard. Mulder coming in to sit beside them, making a silly face to make Emily giggle. He never knew that she had met Mulder. It feels very deliberate, and Jackson responds with a silent but equally deliberate irritation, and it never happens again.

He doesn't know how to feel about these things he keeps seeing. It feels like a better insight into these birth parents of his, but at the same time, he feels like he doesn't know them at all. But he does seem to gain one thing from all of this, and that is that there's plenty of tragedy to go around between the four of them, him and his sister and apparent aunts. They've all lost people, they've all suffered. They're all more or less orphans. Discounting the parents that he and Emily still have that aren't really theirs.

It's only bits and pieces of information until his fourth or fifth night, where it comes full force. He's asleep and he sees it all clearly. There are men, waiting inside an apartment that he already knows is Scully's, and they have guns. They want to kill his birth mother. But Scully isn't the one who opens the door. It's Melissa who opens the door, and Melissa who gets hit, Melissa who falls to the ground, and Jackson wants to throws up at the sight. It's the same way that his parents died: quick, efficient gunshot to the head. Melissa falls just like they did, screams just like his mother did. (He remembers, he hears the sound in his nightmares.)

It's clear that the men have made a mistake, and they're both running off and leaving her behind to die, and Jackson wants to scream at the sight, he's absolutely furious, but it's a dream or a vision or whatever, and he can't do a thing. He wants to wake up, wants so desperately to wake up, but he can't. And things are speeding up, a woman who can only be Scully and Melissa's mother is coming tearfully into the room, sitting at her daughter's side and holding her hand and pleading with her to hold on, bandages across Melissa's forehead and people praying for her… And all Jackson can think of is the rustling of his parents’ body bags against his, the bullet wounds in their foreheads and the nonexistent one in his that he made people see, his grandmother crying on her porch, his birth mother crying over his body…

It's all too familiar, and all he can think is, _Wake up, wake up, fucking wake up,_ but it isn't done. They wheel Melissa back for surgery, and her mother prays. His mother shows up, young and frantic and teary and apologetic, and she and her mother wait. Until a doctor comes in to tell them that Melissa had passed away.

His grandmother's cry is deep and keening and horrified, like a wounded bird. His mother goes pale. His mother just collapses, like the wind has been knocked out of her, collapses in the chair beside the bed and shakes and shakes, a hand over her mouth. His grandmother starts shouting, shouting that she wants to see her daughter, she wants to see her baby girl, just sobbing so hard that it sounds like she might throw up, and the doctor leads her off. His mother doesn't move. Scully doesn't move, sits in the chair, breaks off into disbelieving, nearly hysterical sobs. She just sits there until his father shows up, well after she's finished crying, crouches beside the chair and wraps his arms around her. They stay there for a long time.

Meanwhile, whatever they've shown Scully's mother, it isn't Melissa. Melissa is unconscious in an ambulance. She's hooked up to an IV, and they're driving her away. She still has the wound in her forehead, the same scar Jackson saw a few days ago, and they're taking her away, they're kidnapping her while her mother and sister cry for her, while they fucking mourn…

Jackson wakes up with a start and runs. He runs immediately, because that's what he knows how to do, freshly washed sweatshirt of his dad's (his real dad's) flopping down over his wrists, gasping for air like he's hyperventilating, thinking, _Nonononono…_

He doesn't stop until he hits the front porch of Samantha's cabin, feels that freezing mountain air hit him. And then he's collapsing weakly against the wall, gulping in breaths and blinking hard. He doesn't know these people, but he felt their grief. He's _experienced_ their grief, just a few weeks ago. He's felt that grief for him. He feels tears wet on his face, gasps for breath desperately and reminds himself that Melissa is _alive._

But Scully didn't know that. Scully thought her sister died because of her, and just a little while ago, she'd thought her son died the same way…

Jackson is running again, but he isn't running away. He's running towards something, the cabin he knows to be Melissa's. He couldn't answer the question of _why_ he is doing it; all he knows is that he is. He runs up the porch and bursts through the door so loudly he instantly regrets it; Melissa and Emily are probably sleeping.

But Melissa isn't sleeping. A light is on in the kitchen, and she's sitting at the table with a steaming mug in hand. “Jackson?” she says, clearly startled. “Is everything okay?”

His eyes dart frantically around the room, to the dreamcatchers and crystals, the potted plants and the pictures of Melissa and Emily pinned up on the wall. The framed photo of the Scully family—he knows it's them from his visions, he could rattle off their names: Bill Sr., Maggie, Bill Jr., Charlie, Melissa, Dana—mimicking the Mulder family photo in Samantha's cabin. All these lost and torn apart families. “Y-yeah,” he says, shivering in the cold air from the open door. “Fine.”

Melissa stands, concern echoing in her eyes. “Here, come in,” she says, crossing the room and tugging him in gently, closing the door behind him. “Do you want some tea? I have some tea made.”

He hates tea, but he finds himself nodding, following Melissa back to the table. He sits, numbly, at the table while Melissa retrieves a mug and pours some tea into it. “Do you want cream and sugar? Honey? Anything?” she asks. He nods again, and she doesn't ask him to clarify. “Emily's asleep,” she says, stirring some milk into the mug. “She always sleeps like the dead… I could go and wake her up for you…”

“I saw what happened to you,” Jackson blurts. Just like that.

The spoon clatters loudly against the porcelain. Melissa freezes, her shoulders tensing. “Oh,” she says softly. “Em… Emily told me that you could see things.”

He nods, a little frantically, tapping his fingers on the table. Nervous habit. He can't relax.

Melissa turns back towards him, her face hard and neutral, and hands him the mug. She's wearing a sweater thrown over those button-up pajamas that she and Scully grew up wearing, sensible tradition, and Jackson can't fucking believe he knows that. All this shit he shouldn't know. Her hair is a little messy, one strand of it hanging over her forehead, but he can still see the bullet scar. Almost in the same place as the wound he made people see in his forehead. Jackson wraps his hands around the mug hard and tries not to grimace.

“Are you okay?” Melissa asks gently.

He's suddenly disgusted at the fact that this woman he barely knows is concerned if _he_ is okay when he saw something that happened to _her_. He doesn't know why he is, but he knows that it's fucking ridiculous. _Ridiculous_. “Are _you_ okay?” he snaps, clutching the mug harder. “How did you… That was fucking _awful_. How did you… get _out_ of that?”

Melissa laughs in a bitter sort of way. “It wasn't really something I did myself,” she says quietly. “I was… powerless. They took me, and I was in a coma for years. Three or four, I think…” She shakes her head hard. “I don't know much about medical things. That was always Dana's forte. But she was in a coma once, and we didn't think she'd wake up. Mom and I were ready to let her go because we thought she wouldn't want to live that way. And she lived, thank God, and a part of me will always regret giving up on her that easy… but when I woke up, after all that time… I wished that there had been someone to let _me_ go. Four years is a long time.”

She's solemn, bent over her cup of tea with some stately look on her face. “You… regret living through that?” Jackson asks softly. Right about now, he might understand that sentiment more than he ever has before. His parents are dead, and he survived. He understands.

Melissa shakes her head immediately. “No. It's… it's hard to explain. There's a lot of things I regret, but I'm glad I survived. I just… when I was in that place, I couldn't understand why they'd kept me alive for so long. I never wanted to live that way. And that was when I realized… these were the same people who took my sister. They did things to her that she couldn't remember. And I didn't know why they brought her back, but me… They let my family think I was dead so they could do things to me like they did to Dana, and they wouldn't have to bring me back. They kept me alive, barely alive, for all that time.”

She seems lost in her words, like she's slipped into some place of unawareness, and Jackson has so many questions, so many, but what slips involuntarily to the surface is, “My birth mom was in a coma?” _They took her?_ he adds silently. _They took her like They took me? How did I never know that?_ Everything he sees, and he never saw that?

Melissa's face pales a little with astonishment, awareness. “Oh, shit,” she says immediately. “Will—er, Jackson… I—”

“It's fine,” Jackson says, recovering quickly. Weird fucking night. It's a weird fucking night, and he's not sure that he likes it, but he wants to hear the rest. “Keep going, okay? How did you get here?”

“Okay,” Melissa says. She takes a long drink of her tea, watching him carefully. “So they took me, and they kept me alive, and when I woke up, they kept me for a month. Whoever these… people are.” She tucks some hair absently behind her ear, nail polish flashing in the dim light. “I remember, I used to think that Dana would come for me,” she says, and it reminds Jackson too much of what Emily said about Scully, the things he used to think when he was a kid. He gulps, looking away from Melissa. “But she didn't. She didn't know I was alive. Someone else got me out after a month, and brought me here.”

“Who was that?”

“I doubt you'd know her. She said her name was Diana Fowley, and I think she knew your parents somehow. Apparently, she'd brought Samantha here, and she brought me here, too. She kept saying something about owing Dana this, but I didn't inquire further. I think he didn't want to know.” Melissa shrugs, her posture hard and solid. “And so I've been here ever since.”

“And your family… they don't know you're alive,” Jackson says slowly, trying his best to be nonjudgmental. He hadn't intentionally tried to make Mulder and Scully think he was dead (he never wanted to make anyone sound the way Scully had in that fucking morgue), but he also purposefully hadn't shown them he was alive. He'd thought it was too dangerous. The most he did was send a dream.

Melissa grimaces. “One of those regrets I mentioned.” She shakes her head. “No, they don't know. This Diana Fowley told me first, and Samantha has reiterated it for years: it's too dangerous. I'd be risking me and my family and friends if I had contact with them. I never quite understood why, but I didn't want to risk the people I loved, so I kept my mouth shut. And once we… got news about what had happened with you—” She gestures to Jackson, and he swears he can feel it. “—Fox leaving you and Dana to keep you safe, and… and Dana giving you up…” Melissa continues, her voice choked with apology. “I really believed her. Even afterwards, when Dana and Fox dropped off the grid… I wanted to contact them, and I think Samantha did, too. But we were terrified of blowing their cover. Making the danger worse. We got a new contact after a while, after Diana Fowley also dropped over the grid—Monica Reyes, I doubt you remember her, but she knew you when you were a baby—and she didn't know how to find them. And so that was another reason.” Melissa sighs, rubbing at her forehead, her eyes. “Me, I have more family then Samantha. I always wanted to contact Mom, or my brothers, in addition to Dana. And I almost did, several times. But aside from the fear that someone would hurt them… Honestly, Jackson, I thought that they might resent me for not doing it sooner. For letting them think that I was dead.”

Jackson thinks of the fury on his grandmother's face. _You're supposed to be dead,_ and _You killed my son._ “Yeah, I know the feeling,” he says roughly.

Melissa reaches across the table and squeezes his shoulder, and he doesn't have the heart to shake her off, so he lets her. He takes a swig of tea and immediately winces; he hates tea.

“You know, I've spent a lot of time trying to convince myself that this all happened for a reason,” says Melissa. “That this was fate, that this was the way that everything was supposed to happen. But I've been here nearly twenty years, Jackson, and I’m still not completely sure.” She squeezes his shoulder again before letting go. “I have a lot of regrets. But I can never completely regret coming here, because I never would've been able to help Samantha save Emily. I wouldn't have gotten to know my niece, or take care of her. And as shitty as everything else is, I'm trying to be grateful for that.”

He'd love to echo that sentiment. He really would. He wants to not resent Scully for giving him up, because he wouldn't know his parents if she hadn't. But it's too hard to, now, with both of them dead. With both of them dead, and all these regrets, and everything that's happened to him. He nods, and hopes it's enough.

Melissa takes another drink of her tea. “You know,” she says suddenly, “you really remind me of your father, Jackson. Or at least the way your father was when I knew him.”

It's startling, but not too startling; he kind of expected that, after seeing that picture in Samantha's place. “Is that right,” he says dully.

Oblivious, Melissa keeps going. “Oh, yes, you really do. You know, I like to think I can see a little bit of Dana in you—and that probably has a lot to do with how much I miss her—but you really do look just like Fox.” She smiles at him, and it's such a genuine smile that he can't stand it. Jackson ducks his head to stare at his tea.

He speaks after a few minutes in silence. “So… you ever tried to read your fortune in tea leaves?” He doesn't know where that came from, aside from the tea, but he and Bri tried to do that once. She was really into superstitious stuff. Ghost stories.

“Oh, this tea was made with a bag,” says Melissa. “But yeah, I used to. All the time.”

Jackson laughs, hard. Harder than he probably should. But he's exhausted, and right now, the whole thing seems pretty funny.

After a minute, Melissa laughs, too. Her laugh sounds the same as Ginger's did, when he heard it a long time ago.

\---

Melissa lets Jackson pass out on the couch. Even gets him a blanket and pillow. He wishes he'd had the peace of mind to look for booze or weed or something—after the night he had, he sure could use some—but he's so exhausted, he pretty much just falls asleep. But he's grateful despite it all that she lets him stay, considering that he barged into her place and demanded to know about the traumatic event that ultimately shaped her life, and probably wasn't very nice about it.

In the morning, Samantha comes over, and definitely seems surprised to see him there, but she doesn't comment. He's about to rush out and go hide in the woods or something, but Melissa asks if he wants to stay for breakfast. And Jackson would feel like a giant asshole if he walked out after last night.

So he stays. It's not… the shittiest meal he's ever partaken in. He wouldn't quite call it nice, but it's definitely not shitty. Melissa makes the eggs, Samantha makes the bacon, Emily makes the toast. He makes the coffee.

\---

He has been very clear with himself: he is not looking for another family. Absolutely not. Especially not new parents. It's a large part of the reason that he didn't go with Mulder and Scully (aside from fear, confusion, nervousness as a product of years of asking himself, _Why did they give me up?_ , and a tiny part of him that blamed Scully for not being able to save his parents when he was trying to ask for her help). He doesn't want to replace anyone, especially not with the family who did give him up. Rejected him. He doesn't want any part of it.

But he's starting to like Emily and Melissa and even Samantha, who has kind of been keeping her distance. It's entirely accidental, but a part of him feels like he can't help it. _They_ aren't the ones who gave him up. Even if Samantha did think about bringing him back here, she didn't. She left him with his family. And it's hard not to bond with Emily, considering everything they've been through. Everything all of them have been through. He's not exactly running around giving hugs and call them _Aunt_ , but it's something. It makes him feel stunningly guilty, but it's something.

It mostly happens because of what happens that night with Melissa, he thinks, and then something else, on November 27. Something that he really should've seen coming, considering all the shit he just knows without having ever been told. He thinks he knew that Samantha was abducted when Mulder was a kid—somehow, somehow he knew, despite no one _did_ ever explicitly tell him—but he also can't believe that with all of the unexplainable shit he knows that he didn't know the significance of November 27.

The day itself is fairly normal. He doesn't see Samantha, but he doesn't think anything of it. He shoots baskets down on the blacktop, he goes for a long run down to the lake and back, he watches TV in his room. He conks out sometime around ten, and falls right into one of his usual dreams.

It's a scene he recognizes almost immediately, instinctively: those kids from the photo out in the living room, playing a board game in front of the TV. Samantha and the kid version of who Jackson knows is his birth father. Fox Mulder. Samantha's eight, he knows immediately, which means that Mulder is twelve. Twelve, the same age Emily was when she mouthed off to doctors and tried to protect the other kids and hid with him behind the couch. The same age as when Samantha and Melissa came and saved her. Same age as when he got into one of the worst fight, fell out of a tree and broke his wrist and tasted copper in his mouth, flashes of copper behind his eyes. Fucking twelve.

Samantha and Mulder are playing their game. They're arguing about the TV, bickering in the way that siblings do. Samantha gets up and changes the channel, and Mulder shouts, “Hey! Get out of my life!” Jackson winces instinctively, knowing what's coming. Thinking of bits and pieces he's seen of his father's grief, years and years of being fooled and finally accepting the loss while Samantha has been alive all this time, Samantha that first night: _I'm his sister. I haven't seen him since I was eight years old._

Mulder gets up to change the channel back, and Samantha shrieks right into his ear. He stands so that he is taller than her, looking down and glaring, and says, “I'm watching _The Magician_.” And it's like watching a horror movie, where all you want to do is scream at the people, to warn them as to what's coming, but you can't. The power goes out, and Jackson wants to scream, wants to stop this, wants to know how different _his_ life would be, not to mention Samantha's and Mulder's lives, if this hadn't happened. He wishes he could stop seeing the points where his birth family's lives were ruined.

“Now look,” the young Mulder says with the same kind of disgust Jackson has heard in his own voice more than once. “The fuse is blown.”

The room begins to shake, a picture against the wall rattling. “Fox,” Samantha says in a nervous, uncertain voice, and she sounds so _young,_ so small, nothing like the woman who saved him at the farm. The room shakes harder, the board game pieces rattling, weird lights filling the room. The door creaks open. Samantha screams.

Mulder begins to panic, bellowing his little sister's name at the top of his lungs, running to a cabinet and knocking down a box, scooping up the gun that tumbles out. But it's too late, Samantha is suspended in the air, floating away, and Mulder is crying out, and there's nothing he can do, it's all just slipping away…

Jackson wakes up with a jolt, sweaty and gasping despite the chill seeping in through the glass of the windows. He doesn't think the heat is on. He shudders, clenching his teeth to avoid chattering, rolling over and getting to his feet. Gropes for his father's sweatshirt and pulls it over his head. His mouth is bone-dry, his breath stale; he stumbles out of the bedroom in search of a glass of water.

He finds in the living room more or less what he expected. Melissa and Emily are sprawled out on one of the couches, asleep. The TV is on in the background, quietly, blue light bouncing around the room. Samantha's on the other couch, throw blanket wrapped around her shoulders and a glass of what he's guessing is alcohol in hand. She doesn't look up when Jackson enters, doesn't look up when he walks over and sits beside her. “You saw, huh,” she says after he's been there for a minute though, and there's something almost like a smile on her face. A sharp smile, hard. He understands.

On the TV, the audience bursts into canned laughter.

Jackson rubs his hands through his hair. Jesus, he needs a haircut. “How did you know?”

“I lived in the same neighborhood as a kid-reading kid for several years, Jackson,” says Samantha with a dry laugh. “And also, Missy told me about what happened the other night.”

“Oh.” He taps his fingers on his knees nervously, staring at the TV and trying absently to figure out what show is on. “I'm sorry,” he offers pathetically, although he does mean it. He does.

“You don't have to be sorry,” Samantha says, and she's slurring her words, just a little. “You can't help it.”

“No, I meant that it happened,” he says. “What happened today, um. Forty years ago?”

“Forty-four,” says Samantha, and her voice is hard. She rubs at her eyes with her fists, and she looks more like the child in his dream. She laughs again, bitterly. Harshly. “Forty-four fucking years since my life went to shit. I could've been a lot of things besides… this.” She kicks the leg of the coffee table.

Jackson swallows, watching the actors onscreen snipe at each other. “He didn't mean it, you know,” he says.

“Who didn't mean what?” Samantha mumbles.

He can't say _Dad_ , and he can't bring himself to call the guy Fox _or_ Mulder, so he says, “Your brother.”

Samantha blinks. Her eyes are big and dark, not unlike Jackson's eyes, and the family resemblance makes him uncomfortable immediately. “What?” she asks, blinking again in confusion, shaking hair out of her face.

He doesn't want to say it, but he feels like he has to. “When he told you to get out of his life,” he murmurs. “He didn't mean it.”

“ _Oh_.” Samantha shakes her head hard, this time in disagreement. “I _know_ that. Or I always _thought_ I knew that. He was a dumb kid, and so was I.”

“Oh.” Jackson clenches his fingers together, pressing his palms close until it's almost uncomfortable. Grits his teeth. “Yeah.” He thinks of Emily at twelve, running into his hospital room in the middle of the night to hug him goodbye before she disappeared, no explanation besides a whispered, _I'm really gonna miss you, I know you'll get out okay_. Of himself at twelve, getting in fights and causing chaos just for the fuck of it. Fucking twelve.

“You look like him,” Samantha says, and it sounds like she's crying. She takes a sip of her drink, rubs at her eyes with the heel of her hand. “You look just like him.”

“I know,” says Jackson, because he does. He does know. He takes a hard breath; his throat stings. “That's why… that's why you've been avoiding me, right. Because I look like him.”

“I don't want to make you feel weird,” Samantha mumbles into her knees. “But you're my nephew. You're the only family I have left anymore.” She sounds disgusted, sounds like she definitely is crying.

Jackson resists the urge to protest, to shake his head, because it feels hard to deny it in this moment. “He's still alive, you know,” he says, maybe a little harshly. Samantha doesn't look up, so he adds in the name of niceness, “And Melissa and Emily… they're your family, too…” Because they're family even if they're not, family is much, much more than DNA…

“My parents are dead. My brother thinks I'm dead,” she whispers. “I love Missy and Emily, but it's hard to forget… We're only here cause we can't be there.” Her words are slurring again; she lifts her head a little to rub at her eyes. “I know Missy… Missy would rather be with her family,” she says. “I think she resents me for that.”

Jackson doesn't say anything, because he's always been shit at comforting people. Instead, he reaches for the bottle Samantha has opened on the coffee table—wine, he surmises from the smell. Emily and Melissa are both still asleep, so he tops off Samantha's glass before pouring himself one.

Samantha lifts her head from her knees, hair rumpled and eyes a little accusatory. “Aren't you a little young for that,” she says flatly, picking up her glass.

“And?” He takes a swig from his glass and immediately winces; he's used to stale beer.

Samantha shrugs, taking a sip from her own. “Don't tell your dad,” she says, and immediately winces.

And at any other point in time, Jackson may have reacted badly to that comment. But this time he surprises Samantha and himself both: he laughs, so hard that the wine sloshes back and forth in his glass. Laughs the same way he did in Melissa's kitchen, so hard his stomach hurts.

After a beat, Samantha laughs too, cackling louder and longer than himself. Jackson doesn't mind. It's funny. “I feel,” she says grandly, gesturing with her glass, reaching up with her free hand to wipe her eyes, “that as an aunt, it is my birthright to say that.”

Jackson laughs, a little weaker this time. Gulps down the rest of the wine and pours himself another glass.

Samantha doesn't comment. They drink together silently on the couch, the TV casting funny shadows on the wall, casting away the demons of November 27.

\---

He finishes a pretty decent portion of the bottle and wakes up with a fairly nasty hangover. Emily brings him aspirin and a glass of water, and calls him a dumbass as she hands it over. “Thanks, Em. I needed that,” he says dryly, swallowing the pills and chugging the water gratefully.

“You _did_ need that,” Emily says, tousling his hair as she sits down beside him. He swats at her hand in the way he suspects an annoyed little brother would. “Getting drunk can often be a risky venture, you know,” she adds. “Hangovers are proof enough of that.”

“That definitely was not my first time getting drunk,” he shoots back. He's been to a dozen or more parties at the Chimera or at the old sugar factory, and nursed a dozen or more hangovers hiding under the covers in his bed.

Emily pats his head, and he swats her hand away again. She sticks her tongue out at him, grinning, and he rolls his eyes so hard it hurts. Melissa's in the kitchen, he thinks; he can already smell the eggs.

Samantha exits her bedroom with giant circles under her eyes and a mug of coffee in hand, and she offers him a small smile when she sees him.

Jackson smiles back—awkwardly, because he's never been good at smiling on cue. But what the hell. He doesn't exactly want to be her replacement brother, but she let him drink, like, half a bottle of wine last night. And it was almost nice, very nearly a good, companionable moment. He thinks he owes her this.


	3. Chapter 3

So this is what Jackson does now. He lives among these inexplicable long-lost relatives, and he tries not to question it. They aren't new parents, he tells himself. They definitely aren't that. And the other parts, the extended members of his family have basically rejected him, and he won't dare try again after what happened with his grandmother. So it must be okay. He's safe here, and his parents can't resent him for being safe, can they? And he still hasn't called Samantha or Melissa  _Aunt._

It's in the little shit. Samantha kind of gives him warning looks when he goes for the booze, so he holds back, but they watch Netflix on the couch a lot of nights. They like the same old sitcoms that never touch the areas that they don't want to hear about, tests and hospitals and dead parents. Samantha plays basketball, it turns out, and they play one on one on the blacktop sometimes because what the hell else is he going to do. (The first time they play, she beats him by a  _wide_ margin. He taunts, “You're pretty good for a woman in her fifties,” and she looks astonished for a second before making a face and telling him to shut the hell up.) He plays a lot of board games with Melissa and Emily, he and Emily hike the mountains sometimes. He and Emily are the most likely to hang out, goof off and do dumb kid stuff even though she is in her twenties, like the siblinghood they never had. Strange little companionable situations and plenty of isolation seem to make this situation that he's actually willing to stay in.

Emily makes him go with her to get groceries at one point, shows him the tiny-ass town that they are closest to. It's cute, reminds him of his hometown in Wyoming. Nothing like Norfolk.

The clerk at the grocery store recognizes her, and has plenty of questions about who he is. “He's my little brother,” Emily says, tousling his hair as he tries to duck away. (He's actually _taller_  than her, it looks fucking ridiculous for her to do that.) “I thought it was about time he helped me out with the groceries,” she adds smugly, as if he'd been ducking responsibilities all this time instead of literally having only been around two weeks.

“Oh, you two look just alike!” says the clerk, and Jackson wants to call him a liar, but they do look alike, just a little. In the face; their profiles are similar. They both have some freckles, although Emily has more. He sees it, but it makes him uncomfortable, and he can't believe this random fucking stranger sees it. He ducks his head and studiously ignores the guy. 

He helps carry the groceries, and Emily makes him drive back to camp, tossing him the keys with the excuse of, “I'm tired.” (He's secretly relieved; his sister drives like a maniac. He probably isn't much better, but riding with Emily feels like an adventure, or something meant for thrill-seekers. Especially with all those mountain curves.) He takes the keys and drives back, trying not to dwell on what the clerk said. But it sticks with him anyway. They look alike. He has a big sister. It's easy to forget sometimes, hut he actually has a sister.

(Emily may be the one family member he doesn't feel guilty about. It feels less wrong to have a sister because he's never had a sister before, she can't be misconstrued as a replacement. Because she was an experiment, too. Because he knew her before his parents died. Because he's always kind of wanted a sister.)

Emily plays music too loud the whole way back to camp and tells him to at least go the speed limit. It's December, and it's probably unreasonable to ride around with all the windows down, but Jackson lets them down anyway.

\---

It strikes him, sometimes, how far he is from his original goal. He wanted to cross the country, find little ways to forget everything that had happened, maybe send Bri and Sarah a postcard or two. Avoid Scully and Mulder and the facets from that part of his life as much as he could, either for the safety of his birth parents and himself, or out of a need not to betray his parents. Maybe figure out how to save the fucking world,  _if_ he can save the fucking world. (Somehow, he seriously doubts it.) But the longer he stays at this abandoned summer camp, the further he feels himself straying away from his plans, his old life. He barely thinks about Bri and Sarah anymore, and considering how that went down, that's probably a good thing. He's done enough to ruin their lives; the best he can do is to stay away. But he doesn't think about his old life in Norfolk much. And he still thinks about his parents, a lot—in his nightmares, in those random guilty moments that hit him at just the right angle to completely gut him, in those moments where he's enjoying himself and he brings up a moment from his past, a funny story or something on pure instinct. And then he remembers: it's not the same. It will never be the same again.

No one ever comments on that, because he knows that all three of the women here can relate to that. It seems to be a different kind of painful for them, especially Emily—she’s brought up a few memories she has of her adoptive parents, although they're less because she was so young, and almost all of them make her cry. Samantha seems the same sort of distanced from her old life as Emily, since it's been over forty years. Sometimes, she'll bring up an argument she had with her brother, or some prank she played, or something like that, but she almost always stops herself whenever Jackson's around, casting those same nervous looks at him that he's more or less gotten used to. He'd rather Samantha treat the subject delicately, he guesses, even though it's beginning to drive him crazy.

Melissa, though. Melissa brings up her family more often. She usually seems happier than Samantha and Emily both when she does, and the stories usually involve her sister whenever Jackson is around. Jackson's birth mother.

He tries his best to ignore it. He really does. Melissa is pretty cool, and she's a good cook (“I used to be a terrible cook, just to piss off my mom,” she tells him once, “but I've been bored out here for almost twenty years, I had to get good at something. I feel like I've betrayed my values, but I couldn't eat Samantha's cooking for another fucking day.”), and she's usually really welcoming to him. She lets him crash on her couch, and doesn't complain when he and Emily stay up too late watching movies and cracking up and making a mess with the popcorn, and doesn't complain when he eats all her food, or when he really does find a weed stash and breaks it out. She's nice. But it gets on his nerves. He doesn't know how to make it clear that he  _can't_  be close to Scully, and call her Mom, and give her hugs, like he  _knows_ Melissa wants. He's a fuck-up, and he meant it when he said he wished he knew Scully better, but he doesn't know how to do it. When he was a little kid, he would've loved to hear these stories. Now, they just make him mad. Make him think about what could have been.

It all comes to a head, of course. Like it always does.

Jackson comes over to Melissa's house one day looking for Emily, and she tells him that Emily's driven into town for the evening. Somehow, this turns into Melissa and Jackson playing Scrabble alone. He's kind of nervous at the prospect of hanging out with her alone, without Emily as a buffer, but he goes with it because there are cookies in a container on the counter, and he'd feel like the biggest asshole in the world if he said no. ( _That's how you know they're family,_ he thinks.  _Because you're afraid to say no and hurt their feelings._ )

He doesn't really care. He's always been pretty good at Scrabble. The first half of the game goes pretty smoothly, with Jackson collecting as many triple word scores as he can, and Melissa telling him stories about her college years that are so ridiculous it makes him crack up. He knew he got his proclivity for troublemaking and getting high from somewhere. “You were pretty badass, back in the day,” he tells her, and she shrugs and says, “What can I say, Dana was always the good one.”

The second half of the game goes downhill from there.

Jackson tries to steer the conversation back into safer waters by trying to interject stories of trouble he and his friends have gotten into, but Melissa can match it with just as many stories about Scully. She used to drag Dana to parties, and Dana was absolutely ridiculous when she got drunk. Dana was a good student, straight A student for all the time she spent in school. Dana used to sneak out every week when she was fourteen and smoke cigarettes, and Melissa  _still_  doesn't know how she didn't get caught. Melissa and Dana used to smoke on the roof at Thanksgiving when things would get too awkward with family. Dana was always great at Scrabble, Melissa thinks she used to read the dictionary when she got bored. Dana used to babysit the neighbor's kids, and she was always just great at it, she always loved kids.

That's the proverbial last straw. That's when Jackson can't take it anymore.

“Stop,” he says quietly, poking at a Q tile with the tip of his finger.

“What was that, Jack?” Melissa asks.

“I said _stop_ ,” he snaps, standing up so fast that his knee hits the bottom of the table and the Scrabble tiles rattle. Melissa looks surprised, but she doesn't say a word.

“I don't want to hear stories about her,” he says, feeling vicious but not knowing how to stop. “She's not my  _mom_. I have a mom. It's not her.”

Melissa doesn't look hurt, incredibly. She says, “You're right.”

Jackson freezes; he's not used to hearing that. He says, “What?”

“I said you're right,” says Melissa, softly. “I was being selfish. I guess I just… I want you to know her as someone more than… the woman who gave you up.”

She's being so nice about it, so reasonable, and Jackson isn't used to people responding this way to his irrational fucking freak-outs. She's probably been telling these stories for years, to Emily, making promises about a mother she'll never meet. “You haven't seen her in almost twenty years,” he hisses, really vicious this time. “You don't know her anymore.”

And Melissa does look hurt by that, and Jackson feels like the biggest asshole on the planet, but he doesn't know what else to do. He doesn't know what else to do. He turns on his heel and storms out of the room, his heartbeat so loud he can hear it in his ears.

He makes it all the way to his bedroom before he bursts into harsh, angry sobs that he muffles in the collar of his sweatshirt, shivering and shaking and rocking on the hard wooden floor.

\---

When he was a kid, he used to think whatever controlled his powers was like another person. Someone who picked what he could do, or what it was he saw whenever he saw clairvoyant shit. He hardly thinks that's the case anymore, but if it is, he'd like to formally tell this outside power to go fuck itself.

He falls asleep on the floor and right into a dream about the absolute last subject he'd want to see right now. He'd love to see, like, something with his parents in it. Some good memory to hold onto. But it's Ginger, and she looks younger than she is now (but definitely older than she was in those visions he got of Melissa's faked death), and it looks like she's giving birth. She's in a dark room on some rickety bed, definitely not a hospital. She's surrounded by people, unfamiliar people who Jackson can immediately tell are not friendly, and a dark-haired woman is bent over her, encouraging her, soothing her. She cries out with the pain of the labor, and Jackson can feel her desperation, her fear. She pleads, “This is my baby! Please don't let them take it!” and Jackson wants to cry out himself. Wants to say,  _I'm not yours,_ but he was. Wants to ask,  _Why did you let me go if I was yours? Why did you let them take me if you didn't want them to?_ He wants to cry. He can hear the tears in her voice.

The woman is telling Scully to push, and she howls with the effort of it, and Jackson wants to look away but he can't. Ginger shouts with pain and distress, fear, tears wet on her face, and suddenly, new cries fill the room.  _His_ cries, tiny and angry and shrill, and Ginger laughs in gaspy panic when she hears it, tears welling in her eyes. Jackson fills another emotion filling him, thick and fierce and unmistakable, one he always wanted his birth mom to feel for him, one he now desperately wants to ignore.

He used to be upset that he didn't have any pictures from the day he was born. He used to wish his mom was his birth mom  _and_  his real mom.

“It's a boy!” the dark-haired woman says cheerfully, holding up the baby— _him_.

“Lemme see him,” Dana says, slurring her words, reaching out almost blindly. “I wanna see him…  _Give me my baby_ , Monica.”

The woman is focused on cutting the cord, tending to him, making sure he is alright. Jackson can feel the eyes of the cultists or whatever on them, trying to make a decision. The baby version of him wails and wails. “Give him to me!” Scully shouts, fierce and nearly feral with protectiveness.

The woman hunches over him protectively as she moves around the bed, lays him on his mother's chest. She bursts into sobs at the contact, covering him with her hands, one on his back and the other cupping his head. The two of them cry together, and she puts her head down by his and whispers something that should probably be indecipherable in the chaos of the room. But Jackson hears it. He hears every word.

She says, “It's okay. It's going to be okay, baby. I've got you. I've got you. I love you  _so_  much.”

Jackson wakes up on the floor quivering with cold. It's full-on winter, and he's freezing, and his back is killing him. His face is wet again. He presses his hands to his face and rolls over on his stomach. He's shaking, quivering from head to toe.

The truth is that he wasn't lying at that gas station. He  _wants_ to know her better. Ginger, Dana Scully, his birth mother. He  _wants_  her to want him, to love him. He's wanted it since he was a little kid. But he can't  _let_  himself want it, because she gave him up, and his parents are dead, and Jesus Christ, things are supposed to be easier than this.

He's shaking and crying, and he screws his eyes shut, and he can hear her voice again:  _I've got you. I love you._ That's the first thing she ever said to him. And she gave him up. She fucking gave him up. But she said she wanted him. She said she was sorry she didn't get a chance to know him. She said it was the hardest thing she's ever done. He doesn't know what to do.

He's seen her all his life. When he was a kid, when he was scared or sad. He thinks he always knew who she was. He's resented her and he's wondered about her and he's longed to know whether or not she loved him. And now he is here.

He picks himself up off the floor and curls up on the bed, because the floor is fucking awful. He wipes his eyes, his cheeks, and presses his face into his palms. Screws his eyes shut and wishes, just once, to see something happy from his life when he falls asleep.

\---

Jackson finds cans of beer in Samantha's refrigerator. He takes two and climbs up to the loft tucked under the ceiling. He sits on the floor with the back against the wall and pops one of them open like a soda. The bitter taste reminds him of Norfolk, sea-salt air and gritty dirt on the soles of his shoes. He closes his eyes and pretends that he is home.

He opens them minutes later at the creaking of the ladder. Samantha appears over the edge of the floor a second later, wincing a little as she steps into the loft. “Want some company?” she asks, and he shrugs. She sits beside him against the wall, picking up the other beer and cracking it open.

“That was mine,” Jackson says, not really caring.

“You know, Fox and I used to share a loft like this,” Samantha says in lieu of a response, taking a sip. “At our vacation house in Quonochontaug, Rhode Island.”

Jackson snorts. “Vacation home, huh,” he says. “You guys were rich?”

“Rich with blood money, yeah,” Samantha replies, her voice bitter. “It wasn't exactly an idyllic lifestyle, kid.”

He drains his can with one gulp. He says, “I don't think any of us exactly had an idyllic lifestyle.”

“That's true,” says Samantha.

They sit in silence. Samantha drinks her beer, Jackson picks at his beer label with his fingernails. He's tempted to ask if Melissa and Emily are pissed at him, but he doesn't. Samantha speaks on that subject first. She says, “Missy and Emily told me what happened…”

“I don't get it,” Jackson says before she can finish. Rips the blue label all the way off and chucks the can at the wall. It makes a loud clanking sound as it hits the floor, lying dormant. “You guys have been hiding out here for years because it'd be too dangerous for your families if you told them you were alive. Melissa told me she's wanted to go home, but she couldn't. So… how come I can leave? How come you said I could leave at any time?”

She seems nearly stunned by silence before answering. Nearly confused. “You're… different, Jackson,” she says uncertainly. “We're not going to force you to stay…”

“But it's totally okay for me to go find Mulder and Scully, for some reason,” he snaps, knocking his foot against the floor. “That's totally fine. No fucking problem.”

“I've never…”

“Yeah, and why haven't you ever? Why aren't you just  _begging_  me to run home to my mommy and daddy, and give them a big old hug, and make your long lost brother  _so_  happy?”

“Because  _I_ can't even take that advice,” Samantha snaps, and it's enough to shut him the hell up. His shoulders hit the wall hard in defeat.

Samantha sighs, pressing her hands over her eyes. “I've been here since 1997, Jackson. Twenty years. In that time, my mom has died, I learned that my dad was dead, and a series of absolute horrible things have happened to my brother. And I didn't go home after any of those times, even after my mother died—who I was a lot closer to than my father, and who I resented a lot less, since she didn't technically choose to give me up to these conspirators over my brother like my father did.”

Astonishment washes over Jackson; he had no idea. He probably should've, considering all he's seen, but he really had no idea.

Samantha sighs, gritting her teeth grimly. “Right around the time Mom died, someone apparently fooled Fox into thinking that I died a long time ago, and it just felt… right. It's horrible, but I thought I could… I dunno, give him some peace if he finally thought I was dead. I knew how long he'd been looking.” Her voice cracks, quivering. “I… I thought maybe it was the right thing to do. I thought it'd be better that way.”

Shaken, stunned, Jackson blinks in shock. Thinking about what he saw in that living room forty-some years ago. Those scared fucking kids. “How the hell… how did you know all this?” he stammers.

Samantha rubs at her eyes. “The woman who brought me here kept me informed,” she says thickly.

He nods knowingly, remembering what Melissa told him. “Diana something, right? Melissa told me she brought you both here.”

“She did,” Samantha says softly. “I was the first one. She was working with the Consortium in Europe, and she… she found out where I was being held after an incident in the spring of ‘97.” She rubs at her eyes again, her forehead, as if she's crying. “I left something out before, when I said I hadn't seen Fox since I was twelve. I met him once after that. This guy who was… trying to manipulate him… Something about your mom being sick or something, I don't know… But he wanted me to tell Fox that he was my father, and that I thought our mom was dead, and refuse to see him or go see her. To tell him I had a family of my own. And I… I went along with it because I was scared. At the time, I was thirty-two, and I'd been in those facilities for twenty-four years. I was absolutely terrified. So I went along with it, even though it killed me. I wanted to tell him what was happening, to see if he could help me, but I was so scared about what would happen. So I… I walked right out and right back to the people who’d kept me captive since I was a kid.” She buries her face in her hands again. “Diana Fowley found me after that,” she says into her hands.

Jackson's mouth is hanging open a little bit. “Who… who is Diana Fowley?”

“She said she was Fox's ex-boyfriend. I guess she was working against him, too, and she felt guilty for what she was doing to him.” She grimaces with disgust. “I was supposed to be moved to another facility after I met with Fox, and she intercepted it. Got me out, brought me here. She told me it was because she owed my brother, and that he'd been looking for me as long as she knew him. And she told me I couldn't have any contact with him. Not with him, or my mom, or anyone from my old life. She said it was too dangerous. She said that we'd all die if I did.”

“And that's… that's why you never wanted to go back,” Jackson says softly.

Samantha shrugs, sniffling just a little. “It spooked me. That night I saw my brother was overwhelming. He was so… so relieved to see me. And I wanted to go with him, see my mom, tell him what they'd done to me and see if he could get me out… But it was hard. I had no idea how to respond. And I… I think I've been scared all this time about what would happen if I went home.”

“What happened, though?” Jackson asks, because that's the question he really wants answered. How did they get here, what happened to his birth parents, how does Samantha know all of this. “You clearly have some idea of what happened to your brother… And you know who my birth mom is, because of Melissa… So what happened?”

She shrugs. “Diana kept in touch. She kept me informed, kept visiting. I wanted to know that my family was okay, after she scared me so bad… And then she brought Melissa here a couple years later. Missy knew Fox, at least a little, and told me about his partnership with your mom… Diana kept us both informed for a really long time. She was watching your parents, although they thought  _she_  was dead, and Missy and I both wanted to know that our families were okay, so that was our agreement. She told us when Fox thought I was dead, and she told us when Fox was abducted, and she told us when, uh…” She takes a sharp breath. “... when Fox was presumed dead. And then when they figured out he was alive. And she told us when they had you.”

Jackson can suddenly see the dream he had last night: his birth mother crying out in pain, demanding to see him. How protective she was. He can't quite put together the chain of events, but Jesus Christ, it makes sense that she was so panicked. There'd been a point where it was assumed that his birth father was dead?

“Diana cut off contact in 2002, right around the same time your parents went on the run,” Samantha says, sounding a little more composed now. She sniffs again, runs a finger tip under her eye.

“After they gave me up for adoption,” says Jackson, feeling like the air has been knocked out of him. This is all harder to hear than he ever would've imagined.

Samantha turns towards him, her eyes soft. “Yeah,” she says softly. “After that.”

He swallows, his head hitting the wall gently. “Melissa said you got a new contact then,” he mumbles. “That you thought about contacting my parents after they went on the run.”

“We did,” Samantha says roughly. “But I thought it might be just as dangerous as contacting them when they were  _on_  the grid. I… I zeroed in my focus on making this place somewhere where people could hide out. I looked for kids that had been in the situation I grew up in, and that's how I found Emily. And I tried to keep an eye on you, make sure you were safe.” She sighs, finger-combing hair away from her face, thumbing a tear away. “And here we are. I never tried to contact my brother. And now it seems more or less useless, after all these years of hiding, never telling him I was alive… I can't tell you to go home, Jackson. I won't put pressure on you, for one, because I know you don't know your birth parents. Missy knows that, too; I think she just wanted you to know that her sister didn't give you up because she didn't want you. But I can't tell you to go and find my brother because I won't go find him either.”

She goes quiet next to him, fingers knotted in her lap. The beer can is sideways on the floor, puddle at the opening. Jackson sighs, staring out of the huge window across from them. His mouth tastes bitter, his stomach sore. “Samantha, I'm starting to think your family is cursed or something,” he says finally, because that feels like the most appropriate thing to say right now. The situation was well and fucked before he ever came on the scene.

Samantha laughs. “Oh, kid,” she says exhaustedly. “I've known that for years.”

\---

Jackson steals three cans of soda and makes two sandwiches, and hikes up into the hills to the waterfall. He's hoping for some time alone, some introspective shit, but he finds Emily there, her hair tossed back in a messy braid, her shoes gathered by the bank and her bare feet dangling in the water. She offers him a small smile when he sits down beside her. “Hey, Jack.”

“Hey, Em.” He peels off his own shoes and kicks at the water. Places like this make him miss the ocean. They sit in silence, watching the river.

“Is Melissa pissed?” he asks finally, head tipped up towards the sun.

Emily shakes her head. “She's not pissed. You could stand to work on your tact… but she's not pissed.”

Jackson nods. He's known about the tact thing for years. “Has she… done that to you?” he adds, wriggling his toes in the river mud. “Told you stories about Scully? How great she is? How much she… loves kids or whatever?”

“Sure she has,” Emily says. “Dana is her sister, and Missy really misses her. She told me a lot of stories about her mom and brothers too.” She shrugs. “The difference is that I  _wanted_  to hear them.”

He isn't surprised. Emily was cheated out of something that he grew up with: two parents who loved him and cared for him. She spent years being experimented on; she was so eager for someone to save her that she cried in that hospital when Samantha and Melissa showed up. He remembers her hugging them like she knew them. But still, he says, “Didn't that make you sad?”

“It did,” says Emily honestly. “I've had a lot of that kind of pain, Jackson. I used to daydream about what it would be like if my parents had never died when I was three. Or if Dana had gotten to adopt me. Or if they'd never taken me away from her in the first place. Or if Dana had never been abducted and they hadn't made me without her consent. I've considered a lot of stuff like that. I think that… all this time, I've really just wanted a family. Throughout all this. And hearing Missy's stories was the closest I could get. But I do have a family. I have Missy and Samantha.”

“But you always wondered about her,” Jackson supplies. He doesn't need to clarify who  _she_  is.

“Of course I did.” She turns to look at him, her eyes bright blue and exactly like Melissa's. Exactly like Ginger's. “Didn't you?”

He doesn't need to answer that. He turns back to the river, the waterfall. The sound of water on water is so loud that everything they say could almost be lost in the noise. But he hears it. He'll remember. He can't lose things that easy.

Finally, he says, “Do you think I should go find them?”

Part of him expects a yes. The rest of him has no fucking idea what to expect. He knows that Emily has been supportive of him doing pretty much whatever he wants. He doesn't know if she'd encourage him to go when she can't.

Emily says, “For years, I've been told by Samantha that I couldn't ever meet my birth mother. That it was too dangerous for me and her both. And for years, I've always thought it would happen one way or another. But now I'm twenty-three years old, and I don't know what the hell to do with myself. I have aunts, and I have a brother, and I'm safe, and I think that's something.” She punches his arm lightly before getting to her feet. “I'm not going to tell you what to do, Jack,” she says, wiping dirty hands on her jeans. “None of us are. But we're here, and we want you to be safe. The rest of it is up to you.”

\---

Things go back to normal. Or as normal as they can be in a situation like this.

The weather grows colder as Christmas grows closer. It's pretty easy to forget the holiday—the others don't really mention it—and Jackson is more than ready to forget it. He doesn't want any reminders of the loss of his parents. From what Emily's told him, this time of year is equally painful for her, her parents died at Christmastime.

The four of them end up hanging out together a lot. Mostly at Melissa's, but occasionally at Samantha's. Watching movies or playing cards. Jackson has no idea how to cook, but he'll help sometimes with throwing snacks together; Samantha and Emily are pretty good at guilting him into helping. He helps Emily with the grocery shopping, too. Samantha finally gets tired of washing the same jeans, t-shirt, and sweatshirt, and drags him into town to buy some new clothes. There's always coffee, and heat, and he feels fairly safe most of the time. It's something of an idyllic existence, compared to weeks on the road, hungry and dirty and grieving.

One night, Jackson is woken up by the flashing of headlights through his window. His initial reaction is panic; he huddles up against the window, his face against the cold glass, and contemplates how the hell he's going to fight these people off. He's pretty capable of defending himself, as evidenced by what happened at the hospital in Norfolk, but he has no idea what kind of threat this is, no idea what Samantha has set up for protective measures, no idea if Samantha is even awake… But he knows he can't let these people get to them, if they've come to hurt them.

The door to Melissa's cabin opens, he can see it from the window. Melissa comes out the door and walks towards the car, and Jackson takes a sharp, panicked breath, his nose pressing against the window. The glass dogs right up. He did  _not_ expect Melissa to be the one to fight people off. Does she know what's happening? Is she prepared to defend herself? Does he have time, the ability, to defend her? He tenses, almost leaning into the window, ready to act. His palms pressed to the cold glass.

A woman gets out of the car and walks towards Melissa, and neither of them seem to react like they're enemies. The woman doesn't look malicious, and Melissa doesn't look scared. But still, Jackson doesn't completely relax until Melissa and the woman are embracing. Until the woman is visible standing in the headlights of the car, and Jackson recognizes her: the woman who helped Scully deliver him. Monica, the informant, he assumes.

He lets his forehead fall against the cold window, scoffs through his teeth. Will these weird goddamn coincidences ever stop.

Melissa and the woman, Monica, are heading towards the house now. Jackson hears the door open outside and scrambles to his feet. He's outside of his room before he can contemplate what the hell he's doing, standing awkwardly in the doorway. Samantha's at the door greeting Monica, saying, “It's good to see you, we were getting a little worried,” and then Melissa scoffs, “A  _little_?” and Jackson's feeling a little awkward, like the way he feels walking into a room full of relatives at holidays without a single thing to talk about. He doesn't know why he came out, and he's getting ready to go back in when they notice him. “Oh, hey, Jack,” Melissa says warmly, and the welcome in her voice makes him instinctively uncomfortable. He feels like he shouldn't be here.

The woman—Monica—turns to him, and a cascade of emotions come over her face. “William, oh my god,” she says, and Jackson tenses immediately. He hasn't been called that since the hospital. “You've really grown up,” she continues thickly.

He remembers her from her dream, handing him to Scully. “Uh, hi,” he says awkwardly.

Monica clears her throat awkwardly, waves it off. “I'm sorry, it's just… I knew you when you were little. I knew your parents.”

_Birth parents,_ Jackson wants to add, but doesn't. “Oh, yeah, I know,” he says, immediately wishing he'd stayed in his room. He waves a hand at the kitchen. “I'm gonna… grab some water.”

“Help yourself,” Samantha says with a small smile.

He pads into the kitchen and grabs a glass, fills it with ice cubes. Closer to the door, he can hear them talking, can hear scraps of words—“Spender…” and “Spartan Virus…” and “When is it coming?” He tries to ignore it. He doesn't want to know. He pours water from the pitcher in the fridge, grabs the pint of ice cream in the freezer just because.

The women are crowded at a table, talking quietly, but they all notice him walking back through. Jackson can tell. Monica and Melissa offer him small smiles. Samantha raises her eyebrows pointedly at the ice cream, which Jackson shrugs off. “It's good to see you again, Jackson,” Monica says, and Jackson notes the use of his real name. “If you have any questions, I'd be glad to answer them for you.”

“Oh—” His shoulders tense up as if protectively. He has questions, and he doesn't want to ask them. “Thank you.”

Monica nods. He nods back, the glass of water chilling one hand and the ice cream chilling another, and keeps going. Part of him wants to hear what they're talking about, but the rest of him wants nothing to do with it.

Just before he enters his room, he hears Melissa say, “So have you told Mulder and Dana—”

He lets the door slam too hard behind him.

\---

They're lying on the bed, the three of them. Mulder and Scully and him, as a baby. And they're calling him William. Scully's wearing this robe, and she's cuddled up to Mulder's side, one hand clutching at his t-shirt and the other on the baby's back. He's is lying on Mulder's chest, and Mulder looks dopily happy. The two of them, they look so happy. It's practically a family portrait.

And there he is. The baby photos he never had.  _You must've been such a cute baby,_ his mom said earlier before wincing, like she hadn't meant to say it. He always used to wonder. And there he is, white blanket and blue onesie. His eyes are blue. His eyes used to be blue, like Emily's. They used to be blue and now they are brown. He used to look like his sister.

They look so happy. Mulder leans down and kisses the top of Scully's head. She presses her cheek against his shoulder, rubs a hand up and down the baby's back. She whispers,  _This is all I wanted._ She says,  _When I asked you to be the father… this is what I wanted._ She sniffles, buries her head against his t-shirt.

His birth father wraps an arm around his birth mother's shoulders.  _This is what I wanted, too,_ he says, and he has tears in his eyes.  _This is it_ , he says, and he kisses the top of the baby's head, too.

When Jackson wakes up, he is thinking of his parents. The picture on his grandmother's mantle of the day they adopted him, where he's much bigger than that. They're holding him between them, his dad holding his mom and him and his mom bouncing him on her knee. They both look so happy. That's what he always noticed when he was a kid: Mom and Dad both looked so happy.

They looked the same way Mulder and Scully did in that dream. Exactly the same.

Jackson wants to be upset, hurt, resentful. The way he's felt after all the other dreams. He wants to feel a greater longing for his parents, his  _real_ parents. He wants to feel as far away as possible from the little kid who daydreamed about the red-headed woman he saw in visions.

But he can't. He doesn't know how he feels, but it's not resentment, somehow.

He thinks he could feel the love in that scene, everything his birth parents were feeling. He thinks he can feel it now. He thinks they really love him.

\---

They have dinner one night, some night close to Christmas. Emily and Jackson cook, and it's close enough to a disaster, but not quite. They're both giggly, which might have something to do with the wine Samantha broke out, and Jackson can't believe how much fun it is. He never expected to have this much fun here.

Towards the end of the meal, Melissa is in the midst of a story about teaching Samantha to drive when she'd first came here, and Emily is cracking up, and Jackson asks the question he's been wondering about for a while. “Okay, I know how you guys got here,” he says, waving his hand with the wine glass in it. “But like… how did you _end up_  here? How did you end up hanging out with the sibling of the person  _your_ sibling ended up with? How did that happen?”

Melissa laughs, a little tipsy. Samantha shrugs widely, scraping her fork over her plate. “Coincidences, I guess,” she says, smiling a little.

“Or fate,” Melissa offers, completely serious.

“We have a  _bounty_ of coincidences and fate here,” Emily points out. “How we all ended up here, and all end up related to each other. How we all ended up as washed-up Syndicate experiments.”

“I don't think that one was a coincidence, exactly,” Samantha says.

“How we're all orphans,” says Jackson. Not even thinking about it. Another dumbass tidbit from Jackson, the jackass who always puts his foot in his mouth. But it's true, he thinks. It's true. They all know what it's like to lose their parents. He feels a little better, being with people who know what it's like to lose their parents.

Emily nods unsteadily, wrapping an arm around his shoulders in what he thinks is a hug. But Melissa is shaking her head. “I'm not,” she says. “My dad passed… back in ‘94, but my mom is still alive.”

Oh, shit.  _Shit_. Jackson can feel himself wincing, because  _she didn't know_? She didn't know? Goddamnit, he is the biggest fucking idiot.

He doesn't know what kind of face he is making, but it's the wrong one. Melissa goes pale. Emily's eyes shift from his face to hers uncertainly, as she takes her arm away from his shoulder. Samantha looks stricken. “My-my mom…?” Melissa asks, her voice wavering.

“I… I thought you knew,” Jackson says, his voice cracking. He's seen his birth mother's tears, her frantic grief, he's seen the funeral, and he thought that Melissa  _knew_.

Melissa's face crumples. She stumbles to her feet and is rushing out of the room, both hands over her mouth, going so fast that she almost runs into the wall. “Missy!” Emily shouts, and she's running after her, her feet pounding the ground. The front door slams, twice.

Jackson buries his face in his hands, horrified. Nauseous. “I thought she  _knew_ ,” he chokes out. “I really thought…”

“I know. I know.” Samantha's suddenly beside him, her arm around him like Melissa's was a minute ago. Jackson can't find the strength to shake it off. He's seeing his mom and dad, bloody and limp in the kitchen, hearing his mother's scream, and  _oh my god_. He can't fucking believe he did that.

“I… I never knew, either,” Samantha says, and there's an extraordinary amount of guilt in her voice, regret. “I never knew. If I'd known, I would've…” She takes a rough breath, squeezes Jackson's shoulder and lets go. “Jesus Christ, poor Missy.”

Jackson rubs a hard hand over his mouth, lets it drop to the table. “I'm such a fucking idiot,” he says.

“You didn't know,” Samantha repeats. She shakes her head hard, her jaw clenched. “I would've let her go home if I'd known. I really had no idea.”

Jackson is unable to say anything else. He lets his face drop into his palms. The two of them sit there in a sort of stunned silence, like they don't know what to do next.

\---

Samantha comes into his room the next morning. He's lying on the bed, flipping through a book in an effort to clear his mind, when she comes in and says quietly, “Emily wants us to come over.” So he goes.

When they get to Emily and Melissa's, Melissa has a suitcase open in the living room. She's stuffing stuff into it, and she doesn't look up when they come in. “Don't try and talk me out of it, Sam,” she says, her voice hard, her eyes wet. “I'm going home. I'm going to see my sister. I'm going to see my family.”

“I know,” Samantha says, her voice soft. “I'm not going to try to stop you.”

Melissa freezes, a book hanging from her fingers. From the kitchen, Emily says, “You're not?” in a shocked voice.

Samantha shakes her head. “Of course not, Missy,” she says gently. “Of course not.”

Melissa lets the book drop to the floor and turns to them, teary-eyed and gratefully, wobbily smiling. She embraces Samantha hard, her face buried in her shoulder. “Thank you,” she mumbles, and Samantha shakes her head hard, dismissive of her thanks, hugs her back genuinely and tightly.

Jackson's heart is thudding, so hard he can feel it in his ribs. Melissa is going to see Scully, and maybe she will tell her where he is, but he doesn't want to dwell on that. He needs to apologize. He feels almost sick to his stomach. He says, “Melissa… I am  _so_  sorry…”

Melissa lets go of Samantha and embraces him next. “Oh, it's okay, Jackson,” she murmurs, her voice thick with grief. “I'm… I'm really glad you told me. I just wish I'd… known sooner.”

Guilt clogs his throat, guilt from this encounter and the last one, and he's doing it before he can consider it: he's wrapping his arms around his aunt and hugging her back.

“Missy?” Emily asks in a small voice, almost childlike. She's approaching tentatively, uncertainly. “Um… can I… would you mind if I…?”

She nods as she lets go of Jackson, wiping at her eyes. “Of course, Em. I was always going to take you with me,” she says, her voice trembling, and Emily smiles in an apprehensive, eager kind of way. And then Melissa turns back to Samantha in a rapid, jerky motion. “You should come, too,” she says, almost insistently.

Samantha's shaking her head already. “Oh, no, Missy, I can't…”

“Yes, you can,” says Emily immediately, reaching out to touch Samantha's shoulder. “Samantha, I know that it's hard for you… to imagine seeing your brother again…”

“I can't do it,” Samantha says, her voice choked. “All these years, I've been alive, let him think I was dead… He's been looking for me for over forty years, and I can't… I can't face him. He's going to hate me.”

“He's not going to hate you,” Melissa says, and she still sounds like she's crying, but her voice is so steady. “I've  _told_ you what Dana told me all those years ago, Samantha, about Fox looking for you… You're his little sister, and you're  _alive_. He never thought he'd see you again. He is not going to hate you.” Samantha shakes her head again, stubbornly, and Melissa touches her other shoulder, whispers, “Samantha, I would never hate my little sister. He is not going to hate you. Please come with us.”

Samantha's chin trembles. She shakes her head again, weaker this time. “I… I can't… leave Jackson here alone. What if they…”

“I'll come with you,” Jackson says.

They turn to him in surprise, and he's honestly floored himself. He had no idea that he was going to say that. He can't believe he did. But now that it's out there, he can't take it back. And he almost thinks he doesn't want to.

Emily grins at him, in that same nervous way. Melissa offers him a small, shaky smile, too, but she's focused on Samantha. Jackson inhales, exhales, meets Samantha's eyes as she looks up. “If it's dangerous…” she tries.

“If it's dangerous, we'll deal with it,” Emily says. “They  _are_  FBI agents, you know.”

Samantha breathes out slowly, her shoulders sagging. Takes a few deep breaths before she nods.

“Okay?” Melissa asks, and Samantha nods again. Melissa embraces her again, letting a choked sob out against her shoulder. Samantha rubs her back comfortingly, looking near tears herself. They hug each other tightly, supporting each other, holding each other up.

Emily is standing beside Jackson; she squeezes his arm as if excited or fearful. Jackson knows that she's been thinking about this for a long time. And if he's being honest with himself, so has he.

“We're really doing this?” she whispers, and he nods. He can't quite believe it, but they are.

\---

In an hour, they've packed the car. Melissa and Samantha remain right on the verge of weepy and giggly and nearly hysterical, supporting each other as they climb into the front seat. Melissa's nervously twisting a soggy tissue on her fist, has nearly torn it to bits. Jackson climbs in the back beside his sister, feeling like a little kid. Thinking of that vision he had, once, of Emily in the car with Samantha and Melissa as they drove away from Wyoming with all the windows down. It really is too cold to do that now, but Emily grins conspiratorially at him. Apprehension and anticipation crackles in the car like a live wire; they have a long trip ahead. He has no idea how they'll be able to make it cross country without losing their minds.

“Do we know where the house is?” Melissa is asking, and Samantha is saying, “Farrs Corner, I think… we could call Monica…”

“It is in Farrs Corner,” Jackson says, and they all turn to look at him. He gulps, adds, “I can help you find it,” because he can.

Melissa and Emily exhale as if relieved, as if nervous. “Okay,” Samantha says, as if it's a decision. And she starts the car.

Jackson feels like he is retracing his steps, headed back cross country to every painful thing he left behind. Except he is not going to Norfolk. As Samantha guides the car onto the dirt road, around the curves, Jackson rests his head on the window and thinks,  _I just want to know that I'm making the right decision. That's all._  

Jackson watches trees and countryside flit by. In the back of his mind, he can see Mulder and Scully in their house, asleep on the couch. Leaning into each other the way they did in his last dream about him. In front of him, the road. The possibilities. How Mulder and Scully will react when they realize that they're all okay. Everything feels like a blur again, like it's going too fast. But he thinks he's okay with it that way.

He thinks that there's no real way to know whether or not this is the right decision. But he thinks that, somehow, this feels right.


End file.
